With the Behind The Social Media Campaign Series, supported by Oneupweb, Mashable took an in-depth look at the makings of eight innovative social media campaigns from Ford, Mattel, Internships.com, Old Spice, Toy Story 3, Edge Shaving Gel, The Voice and Buffalo Wild Wings.
Using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare and SCVNGR, among other social tools, these brands executed successful and engaging social media campaigns worth applauding.
This roundup is dedicated to outlining each campaign. If you find a particular campaign interesting, click through to the article to read the full story.
Edge Shaving Gel’s #soirritating Twitter campaign spreads the word about its anti-irritation gel through random acts of kindness. Here’s an inside look at this creative play.
In its first three months, @EdgeShaveZone gathered about 1,500 followers, the #soirritating hashtag was used about 6,800 times, and attention from numerous media outlets contributed to mounting buzz — all of which likely contributed to Edge’s decision to continue the campaign throughout 2011. Mashable recently spoke with the team at Edelman Digital that runs the campaign, about the factors that have contributed to its success.
Toy Story 3 was one of the biggest films of 2010. As Pixar’s 11th full-length film, the third and final chapter in the world of Buzz Lightyear and Woody hit theaters in June 2010.
Months before that, Disney and Pixar embarked in a wide-scale marketing blitz that covered television, print and social media. Using Facebook and YouTube to help promote the film, the studio raised awareness and successfully targeted demographics that don’t traditionally flock to Disney animated feature films.
Charles Caleb Colton once said, “Imitation is the sincerest (form) of flattery.” Obviously, Mr. Colton was not talking about the success of the Old Spice campaign (seeing as how he lived during the 1700s), but we’re sure he would have reiterated that sentiment if he were to see how many spinoffs the aforementioned marketing miracle has inspired.
The campaign launched just over a year ago — centered around the theme “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” — and captured the imagination of the public. Case in point: The original ad has garnered more than 30 million views to date on YouTube.
Its success also earned Old Spice a legion of students, as it were — folks who cribbed ideas from the ads and applied them to their own marketing efforts. Mashable chatted with a few of these businesses — who have all enjoyed success from following the Old Spice model — about what aspects of the campaign worked for them.
When it comes to brand building, there are basically two schools of thought: “Build it and they will come” and “brainwash the masses.”
The latter is based on the belief that any publicity is good publicity. If you get your name out there, the rest will fall into place. A good example of this philosophy is GoldenPalace.com, which recently bought Justin Bieber’s hair, and in the past has purchased William Shatner’s kidney stone for the free publicity.
At the moment, Internships.com fits the latter category as well. If you’ve heard of the brand, it’s most likely due to a single effective marketing campaign: An endorsement by Charlie Sheen via Twitter.
Exactly seven years after their controversial split on Valentine’s Day in 2004, America’s favorite plastic lovebirds reunited, sending the socialverse down memory lane. In celebration of Ken’s 50th anniversary and just in time for the Valentine’s Day release of its Sweet Talkin’ Ken doll, Mattel launched a grandiose marketing campaign to reunite its iconic doll couple, Barbie and Ken.
We spoke with Lauren Bruksch, director of Barbie marketing at Mattel, to get the inside scoop on the success of the campaign’s social media components.
On the heels of its successful and well-received Ford Fiesta Movement and 2011 Explorer Facebook reveal initiatives, Ford has crafted yet another innovative social media campaign, this time to raise awareness and introduce consumers to the 2012 Focus.
At the center of the campaign is Doug, an irreverent and absurd tweeting, Facebook updating and YouTube uploading sock puppet serving as the spokesperson for the new car.
Mashable spoke with Kelly extensively to get a behind-the-scenes look at the campaign and a progress report on how it’s going.
SCVNGR is a location-based gaming platform –- there are challenges at every venue, and businesses can also “script” their own challenges. Customers can do challenges (take a photo, eat a certain dish) to earn points, which are redeemable for real-world rewards, such as a free drink or 10% off. The Cambridge-based company launched in 2008, and was founded by a 22-year old Princeton dropout who wanted to add a game layer to the world. And that he did.
In January 2011, SCVNGR partnered with Buffalo Wild Wings (BWW) — at all 730 of its locations — for a 12-week campaign leading up to March Madness. The competitive game layer of SCVNGR worked well with the BWW patrons, who thrive on competition, community and games. SCVNGR’s SVP of Marketing Chris Mahl says that what differentiates SCVNGR from other location-based services is that it’s “not a checkin-based service, [but something] that goes further into brand goals [and] consumer goals.” The success of the campaign indicates that may be true. BWW was the first national SCVNGR promotion, and in the first three weeks, the game accrued nearly 30,000 players. By the end, the campaign had 184,000 players at 730 BWW locations.
First there was scripted TV, then reality television became the “it” format. But now that’s getting old and stale, and the audience wants something new. The Voice delivers that, with a highly engaging and social co-viewing experience that’s earned it a spot as the top-rated new show this season. People are ready for a change in entertainment, and The Voice is providing a nice alternative.
Mashable spoke with Nicolle Yaron, the show’s supervising producer, Andrew Adashek, the social media consultant, and Alison Haislip, the social media correspondent, about the show’s social media integration and why it’s effective.
If we didn’t mention your favorite social media campaigns in this roundup, let us know about them in the comments below. We’re always looking to learn from innovative marketing campaigns.
- 6 New & Innovative Social Media Campaigns to Learn From
– How JetBlue’s Social Media Strategy Took Flight
– 5 Ways Social Media Has Changed Marketing Campaigns
– The PR Pro’s Guide to Facebook
– How Converse Became the Biggest Little Sneaker Brand on Facebook
More About: Behind the Social Media Campaign Series, facebook, scvngr, social media, social media marketing, twitter, youtube
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
With the Behind The Social Media Campaign Series, supported by Oneupweb, Mashable took an in-depth look at the makings of eight innovative social media campaigns from Ford, Mattel, Internships.com, Old Spice, Toy Story 3, Edge Shaving Gel, The Voice and Buffalo Wild Wings.
Using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare and SCVNGR, among other social tools, these brands executed successful and engaging social media campaigns worth applauding.
This roundup is dedicated to outlining each campaign. If you find a particular campaign interesting, click through to the article to read the full story.
Edge Shaving Gel’s #soirritating Twitter campaign spreads the word about its anti-irritation gel through random acts of kindness. Here’s an inside look at this creative play.
In its first three months, @EdgeShaveZone gathered about 1,500 followers, the #soirritating hashtag was used about 6,800 times, and attention from numerous media outlets contributed to mounting buzz — all of which likely contributed to Edge’s decision to continue the campaign throughout 2011. Mashable recently spoke with the team at Edelman Digital, that runs the campaign, about the factors that have contributed to its success.
Toy Story 3 was one of the biggest films of 2010. As Pixar’s 11th full-length film, the third and final chapter in the world of Buzz Lightyear and Woody hit theaters in June 2010.
Months before that, Disney and Pixar embarked in a wide-scale marketing blitz that covered television, print and social media. Using Facebook and YouTube to help promote the film, the studio raised awareness and successfully targeted demographics that don’t traditionally flock to Disney animated feature films.
Charles Caleb Colton once said, “Imitation is the sincerest (form) of flattery.” Obviously, Mr. Colton was not talking about the success of the Old Spice campaign (seeing as how he lived during the 1700s), but we’re sure he would have reiterated that sentiment were he to see how many spinoffs the aforementioned marketing miracle has inspired.
The campaign launched just over a year ago — centered around the theme “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” — and captured the imagination of the public. Case in point: The original ad has garnered more than 30 million views to date on YouTube.
Its success also earned Old Spice a legion of students, as it were — folks who cribbed ideas from the ads and applied them to their own marketing efforts. Mashable chatted with a few of these businesses — who have all enjoyed success from following the Old Spice model — about what aspects of the campaign worked for them.
When it comes to brand building, there are basically two schools of thought: “Build it and they will come” and “brainwash the masses.”
The latter is based on the belief that any publicity is good publicity. If you get your name out there, the rest will fall in to place. A good example of this philosophy is GoldenPalace.com, which recently bought Justin Bieber’s hair, and in the past has purchased William Shatner’s kidney stone for the free publicity.
At the moment, Internships.com fits the latter category as well. If you’ve heard of the brand, it’s most likely due to a single effective marketing campaign: An endorsement by Charlie Sheen via Twitter.
Exactly seven years after their controversial split on Valentine’s Day in 2004, America’s favorite plastic lovebirds reunited, sending the socialverse down memory lane. In celebration of Ken’s 50th anniversary and just in time for the Valentine’s Day release of its Sweet Talkin’ Ken doll, Mattel launched a grandiose marketing campaign to reunite its iconic doll couple, Barbie and Ken.
We spoke with Lauren Bruksch, director of Barbie marketing at Mattel, to get the inside scoop on the success of the campaign’s social media components.
On the heels of its successful and well-received Ford Fiesta Movement and 2011 Explorer Facebook reveal initiatives, Ford has crafted yet another innovative social media campaign, this time to raise awareness and introduce consumers to the 2012 Focus.
At the center of the campaign is Doug, an irreverent and absurd tweeting, Facebook updating and YouTube uploading sock puppet serving as the spokesperson for the new car.
Mashable spoke with Kelly extensively to get a behind-the-scenes look at the campaign and a progress report on how its going.
SCVNGR is a location-based gaming platform –- there are challenges at every venue, and businesses can also “script” their own challenges. Customers can do challenges (take a photo, eat a certain dish) to earn points, which are redeemable for real-world rewards, such as a free drink or 10% off. The Cambridge-based company launched in 2008, and was founded by a 22-year old Princeton dropout who wanted to add a game layer to the world. And that he did.
In January 2011, SCVNGR partnered with Buffalo Wild Wings (BWW) — at all 730 of its locations — for a 12-week campaign leading up to March Madness. The competitive game layer of SCVNGR worked well with the BWW patrons, who thrive on competition, community and games. SCVNGR’s SVP of Marketing Chris Mahl says that what differentiates SCVNGR from other location-based services is that it’s “not a checkin-based service, [but something] that goes further into brand goals [and] consumer goals.” The success of the campaign indicates that that may be true. BWW was the first national SCVNGR promotion, and in the first three weeks, the game accrued nearly 30,000 players. By the end, the campaign had 184,000 players at 730 BWW locations.
First there was scripted TV, then reality television became the “it” format. But now that’s getting old and stale, and the audience wants something new. The Voice delivers that, with a highly engaging and social co-viewing experience that’s earned it a spot as the top-rated new show this season. People are ready for a change in entertainment, and The Voice is providing a nice alternative.
Mashable spoke with Nicolle Yaron, the show’s supervising producer, Andrew Adashek, the social media consultant, and Alison Haislip, the social media correspondent, about the show’s social media integration and why it’s effective.
If we didn’t mention your favorite social media campaigns in this roundup, let us know about them in the comments below. We’re always looking to learn from innovative marketing campaigns.
- 6 New & Innovative Social Media Campaigns to Learn From
– How JetBlue’s Social Media Strategy Took Flight
– 5 Ways Social Media Has Changed Marketing Campaigns
– The PR Pro’s Guide to Facebook
– How Converse Became the Biggest Little Sneaker Brand on Facebook
More About: Behind the Social Media Campaign Series, facebook, scvngr, social media, social media marketing, twitter, youtube
For more Business & Marketing coverage:
If you’re not familiar with it, The Voice features musician coaches Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, Adam Levine and Blake Shelton, along with host Carson Daly. During “blind auditions,” singers performed one at a time, and if they caught the attention of one the judges — based on voice alone, as the judges were turned around — then they would join that coach’s team. Each team started with eight artists, then were whittled down to four. The coaches, all of whom have achieved success in the music industry, are grooming the artists and developing their voices and performance skills. Each week, a few artists are eliminated, and the last one standing will be crowned “The Voice.” Mashable spoke with Nicolle Yaron, the show’s supervising producer, Andrew Adashek, the social media consultant, and Alison Haislip, the social media correspondent, about the show’s social media integration and why it’s effective. The Voice isn’t exactly a new show — it was adapted from a Dutch television show called The Voice of Holland. During its first season, the show began trending on Twitter worldwide, and NBC executives realized that there was something to the format. Executive Producers Mark Burnett and Audrey Morrissey were passionate about the highly social program and “stood behind us” as the American crew adapted the show, says Yaron. The Dutch set had screens with live tweets, a social media room, a social media correspondent and a website. Yaron says NBC’s challenge was to take the format from something that serves a small country the size of Rhode Island and make it work over multiple time zones, and also create much more noise and value and push the boundaries in American TV. “From the very beginning, the social media and digital aspect of the show was very important to us,” says Yaron. She wanted to create active engagement and offer accessibility to the coaches to mirror how the show offers access to top stars. “We wanted to create a true, real-time co-viewing experience.” The American version expanded the social aspect to include coach tweets, as well as fan tweets, and because of the massive audience, NBC had to create a filtering program to manage the volume (something the Dutch didn’t have to deal with). So while the idea derived from Holland, the U.S. crew had to develop an entire infrastructure to manage the social media content that would be generated each week. But what separates The Voice from other social television shows is that NBC doesn’t use social media as an awareness and marketing tool — it is core to the show as a whole, so the digital integrations are very organic. “In this day and age, digital and social media for a successful television show can’t be an afterthought — it has to be established in pre-production and developed throughout the show,” Yaron says. She and Adashek laid out a three-stage digital strategy and spent countless hours figuring out the social media strategy and how the show would leverage the judges and the artists. “All the goals we set out have been reached or exceeded, and I think it’s only going to grow and grow as we go into next season. As digital and social media change, we will change too. We set the trends now and we will incorporate new technologies as they develop.”
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb’s free whitepaper, “Measuring Social Media’s Contribution to the Bottom Line: 5 Tactics.”First there was scripted TV, then reality television became the “it” format. But now that’s getting old and stale, and the audience wants something new. The Voice delivers that, with a highly engaging and social co-viewing experience that’s earned it a spot as the top-rated new show this season. People are ready for a change in entertainment, and The Voice is providing a nice alternative.
Borrowing an Idea and Making it Bigger
Casting The Coaches
The show is called The Voice, and not surprisingly the four judges all have distinct radio voices — the raspy Cee Lo Green, the belting Christina Aguilera, the high tenor Adam Levine and the crooner Blake Shelton. Christina wasn’t even on Twitter when she joined the cast as a coach, but her effusive “you go girl” tweets and diva-stacked team have garnered her more than 440,000 followers since she joined — and she has only tweeted 47 times. While Christina’s not the most active tweeter, Yaron says her fans are the most dedicated, and on the show’s premiere day, the “bionic army” had #TeamXtina trending from 9 a.m. until the premiere.
Green had a Twitter account before the show, but wasn’t very active. Levine was moderately active and Shelton was very active on Twitter. But all four coaches had to step up their game for the show, since NBC pushed coach engagement. Since the show is about the artist’s journey under the leadership of the coaches, Yaron says she wanted the coaches to live-tweet the show and broadcast the feeds onscreen in real time “so we continue the storytelling and enhance the experience for the viewers” even when the coach is not on camera. One joke amongst the crew is the “bromance” between Shelton and Levine, which is unabashedly broadcast on Twitter and followed by many of the show’s fans.
Much of the digital integration onscreen in driven by Alison Haislip, who’s no stranger to digital and social media — she spent four years at tech and gaming site G4. Now she’s The Voice‘s “in-show and online correspondent” hanging out in the V-Room with the contestants and serving as “your direct digital connection to everything” related to The Voice.
If you watch the show, you’ll notice that “#TheVoice” isn’t always on the screen reminding you to vote — it’s strategically placed onscreen at times when the producers feel the audience “would be compelled to talk about it.” And it’s an effective strategy. Yaron says that 70% of the tweets about the The Voice include the hashtag #TheVoice, a “phenomenal” rate that a Twitter spokesperson says is an “industry high.”
Last week, during the first of the live shows, tweets that used #TheVoice or the handle of the show, a coach name or an artist name appeared in the lower third section of the screen during parts of the live show. In the V-Room, Haislip is tasked with bridging the online and broadcast elements of the show, and encourages fans to take their dialogue to Facebook, Twitter, NBC Live and NBC.com. “Fans could tweet or post on our Facebook wall and then I could, on air, ask the artists the questions and fans can see the response,” says Haislip. “It really engages the viewers instead of letting them sit back — they become a part of the show.”
The challenge has been managing the sheer volume of tweets — during airtime, there are upwards of 3,000 tweets per minute. “Filtering tweets live has been really interesting because as the show is progressing, the conversation around the show really transforms,” says Adashek. “We have to make sure it fits within broadcast standards, and we want to keep the tweets super fresh and relevant to what the viewers are seeing on TV.” (In case you’re wondering, the West Coast sees a rebroadcast of the East Coast show, so the “live tweets” are taken from the initial airing. However, the West Coast viewers are activated in other ways, and Haislip encourages them to live tweet.)
NBC has been working closely with Twitter to master the live tweet process, and Adashek says Twitter has been very helpful and “really forthcoming with a lot of data and metrics,” which helps the show maximize the impact of its social media-centric platform and also measure its success.
And it is indeed successful. Adashek says that last week, during the show’s first live performances, every contestant, coach and team trended, as did song titles and “Jersey Girl” — an homage to contestant Raquel Castro, who starred in the 2004 movie of that name. “Everything trended last week, no matter how good or bad it was,” he says. “There was enough inertia that everyone was trending.”
“When we look at the graphs and data on Twitter, we can see the peaks and valleys around the calls-to-action — the tweets and the hashtags and the performances,” says Adashek. “It’s like watching The Matrix — we’re pulling massive amounts of data, and when you’re seeing that many tweets, you really can see [trends and sentiment] right way.”
“Twitter was a natural first because it’s very live and real-time, so it lends itself to events,” says Adashek. Facebook is also an important platform for The Voice, but Adashek says it’s more long-term, has different content and is building a fanbase and laying the groundwork for future seasons. Since the coaches have their own highly engaged Facebook Pages, The Voice has been able to reach out to those fans and pull them to the show’s Facebook hub. For instance, last week when Team Christina performed “Lady Marmalade,” the Page gained nearly 10,000 likes within a few minutes.
The Voice is about a journey, and Yaron says the NBC.com homepage has been focusing on “24/7 storytelling and continuing all of the reality stories and experiences of the artists and the coaches and the rivalries between them.” By cultivating the story online and providing a look behind the scenes, The Voice is becoming more than just a weekly television show — it’s nonstop entertainment online, complemented by an hour or two of live performances every week.
“The artists are not sequestered, they’re encouraged to talk about the show as much as they can,” Haislip says. “Regardless of how they do on the show, they still will come out of the competition with something that is going to help them in the future, and they’re all getting a huge leap ahead of the competition.”
That “something” Haislip refers to is digital savvy and a strong fanbase. From the minute they landed in LA for blind auditions, artists were given training in blogging and Facebook Pages and handed Samsung Galaxy Tabs and cameras to document everything from team dinners to rehearsals with photo and video. Each artist has his own hub on the site that links to a blog, Facebook, Twitter, video and photos — viewers really have the opportunity to be heavily invested in the show and the artists, and that translates to better ratings and higher engagement. Giving the artists free reign has let their personalities flourish — Beverly McClellan has started a fake talk show called, “What’s Up With That?” and Jared Blake captured his new ink session on video.
“This is something that every other reality show has kind of shied away from, but we feel really strongly about it,” says Yaron. “We are giving the artists the same platform that real musicians have. We’re training them and mirroring the new ways in which the music industry works. We’re giving them the tools to be the next Lady Gaga. It will help them stay in the competition and become successful music stars. We felt that it was time for a reality show to do that.”
While traditional shows like American Idol (and even The Voice of Holland) use calls and texts to log votes for contestants, The Voice has gone digital. Of course there’s the old standard of voting by phone, but there’s also an NBC Live app, NBC.com and an iTunes-driven voting platform. Instead of texting to vote, you can vote with your wallet and purchase your favorite songs, available from Universal Republic Records. Viewers can vote up to 10 times with each method, so the show encourages cross-platform engagement.
“The iTunes component was a huge part of the digital strategy — it’s an active vote,” says Yaron.
“The story of The Voice is not just an hour or two every week,” Yaron says. “It lives online all day and all week long, and it will continue all year long. This is a living, breathing entity, it’s not just show-based.”
And it might just be the future of television.
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download the Oneupweb sponsored Marketing Sherpa free study, “Measuring Social Media’s Contribution to the Bottom Line: 5 Tactics” to learn how to cut through the clutter and be sure to catch up with them on Facebook and Twitter.
- Twitter + Random Acts of Kindness = A Successful Social Campaign
– How Barbie & Ken Were Reunited by Social Media
– Lessons Learned From The Old Spice Campaign & Its Imitators
– Was the Charlie Sheen Tweet a Win for Internships.com?
– How SCVNGR’s First National Brand Partnership Scored Big During March Madness
More About: american idol, Behind the Social Media Campaign Series, nbc universal, social media, television, the-voice, tv, twitter
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If you’re not familiar with it, The Voice features musician coaches Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, Adam Levine and Blake Shelton, along with host Carson Daly. During “blind auditions,” singers performed one at a time, and if they caught the attention of one the judges — based on voice alone, as the judges were turned around — then they would join that coach’s team. Each team started with eight artists, then were whittled down to four. The coaches, all of whom have achieved success in the music industry, are grooming the artists and developing their voices and performance skills. Each week, a few artists are eliminated, and the last one standing will be crowned “The Voice.” Mashable spoke with Nicolle Yaron, the show’s supervising producer, Andrew Adashek, the social media consultant, and Alison Haislip, the social media correspondent, about the show’s social media integration and why it’s effective. The Voice isn’t exactly a new show — it was adapted from a Dutch television show called The Voice of Holland. During its first season, the show began trending on Twitter worldwide, and NBC executives realized that there was something to the format. Executive Producers Mark Burnett and Audrey Morrissey were passionate about the highly social program and “stood behind us” as the American crew adapted the show, says Yaron. The Dutch set had screens with live tweets, a social media room, a social media correspondent and a website. Yaron says NBC’s challenge was to take the format from something that serves a small country the size of Rhode Island and make it work over multiple time zones, and also create much more noise and value and push the boundaries in American TV. “From the very beginning, the social media and digital aspect of the show was very important to us,” says Yaron. She wanted to create active engagement and offer accessibility to the coaches to mirror how the show offers access to top stars. “We wanted to create a true, real-time co-viewing experience.” The American version expanded the social aspect to include coach tweets, as well as fan tweets, and because of the massive audience, NBC had to create a filtering program to manage the volume (something the Dutch didn’t have to deal with). So while the idea derived from Holland, the U.S. crew had to develop an entire infrastructure to manage the social media content that would be generated each week. But what separates The Voice from other social television shows is that NBC doesn’t use social media as an awareness and marketing tool — it is core to the show as a whole, so the digital integrations are very organic. “In this day and age, digital and social media for a successful television show can’t be an afterthought — it has to be established in pre-production and developed throughout the show,” Yaron says. She and Adashek laid out a three-stage digital strategy and spent countless hours figuring out the social media strategy and how the show would leverage the judges and the artists. “All the goals we set out have been reached or exceeded, and I think it’s only going to grow and grow as we go into next season. As digital and social media change, we will change too. We set the trends now and we will incorporate new technologies as they develop.”
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb’s free whitepaper, “Measuring Social Media’s Contribution to the Bottom Line: 5 Tactics.”First there was scripted TV, then reality television became the “it” format. But now that’s getting old and stale, and the audience wants something new. The Voice delivers that, with a highly engaging and social co-viewing experience that’s earned it a spot as the top-rated new show this season. People are ready for a change in entertainment, and The Voice is providing a nice alternative.
Borrowing an Idea and Making it Bigger
Casting The Coaches
The show is called The Voice, and not surprisingly the four judges all have distinct radio voices — the raspy Cee Lo Green, the belting Christina Aguilera, the high tenor Adam Levine and the crooner Blake Shelton. Christina wasn’t even on Twitter when she joined the cast as a coach, but her effusive “you go girl” tweets and diva-stacked team have garnered her more than 440,000 followers since she joined — and she has only tweeted 47 times. While Christina’s not the most active tweeter, Yaron says her fans are the most dedicated, and on the show’s premiere day, the “bionic army” had #TeamXtina trending from 9 a.m. until the premiere.
Green had a Twitter account before the show, but wasn’t very active. Levine was moderately active and Shelton was very active on Twitter. But all four coaches had to step up their game for the show, since NBC pushed coach engagement. Since the show is about the artist’s journey under the leadership of the coaches, Yaron says she wanted the coaches to live-tweet the show and broadcast the feeds onscreen in real time “so we continue the storytelling and enhance the experience for the viewers” even when the coach is not on camera. One joke amongst the crew is the “bromance” between Shelton and Levine, which is unabashedly broadcast on Twitter and followed by many of the show’s fans.
Much of the digital integration onscreen in driven by Alison Haislip, who’s no stranger to digital and social media — she spent four years at tech and gaming site G4. Now she’s The Voice‘s “in-show and online correspondent” hanging out in the V-Room with the contestants and serving as “your direct digital connection to everything” related to The Voice.
If you watch the show, you’ll notice that “#TheVoice” isn’t always on the screen reminding you to vote — it’s strategically placed onscreen at times when the producers feel the audience “would be compelled to talk about it.” And it’s an effective strategy. Yaron says that 70% of the tweets about the The Voice include the hashtag #TheVoice, a “phenomenal” rate that a Twitter spokesperson says is an “industry high.”
Last week, during the first of the live shows, tweets that used #TheVoice or the handle of the show, a coach name or an artist name appeared in the lower third section of the screen during parts of the live show. In the V-Room, Haislip is tasked with bridging the online and broadcast elements of the show, and encourages fans to take their dialogue to Facebook, Twitter, NBC Live and NBC.com. “Fans could tweet or post on our Facebook wall and then I could, on air, ask the artists the questions and fans can see the response,” says Haislip. “It really engages the viewers instead of letting them sit back — they become a part of the show.”
The challenge has been managing the sheer volume of tweets — during airtime, there are upwards of 3,000 tweets per minute. “Filtering tweets live has been really interesting because as the show is progressing, the conversation around the show really transforms,” says Adashek. “We have to make sure it fits within broadcast standards, and we want to keep the tweets super fresh and relevant to what the viewers are seeing on TV.” (In case you’re wondering, the West Coast sees a rebroadcast of the East Coast show, so the “live tweets” are taken from the initial airing. However, the West Coast viewers are activated in other ways, and Haislip encourages them to live tweet.)
NBC has been working closely with Twitter to master the live tweet process, and Adashek says Twitter has been very helpful and “really forthcoming with a lot of data and metrics,” which helps the show maximize the impact of its social media-centric platform and also measure its success.
And it is indeed successful. Adashek says that last week, during the show’s first live performances, every contestant, coach and team trended, as did song titles and “Jersey Girl” — an homage to contestant Raquel Castro, who starred in the 2004 movie of that name. “Everything trended last week, no matter how good or bad it was,” he says. “There was enough inertia that everyone was trending.”
“When we look at the graphs and data on Twitter, we can see the peaks and valleys around the calls-to-action — the tweets and the hashtags and the performances,” says Adashek. “It’s like watching The Matrix — we’re pulling massive amounts of data, and when you’re seeing that many tweets, you really can see [trends and sentiment] right way.”
“Twitter was a natural first because it’s very live and real-time, so it lends itself to events,” says Adashek. Facebook is also an important platform for The Voice, but Adashek says it’s more long-term, has different content and is building a fanbase and laying the groundwork for future seasons. Since the coaches have their own highly engaged Facebook Pages, The Voice has been able to reach out to those fans and pull them to the show’s Facebook hub. For instance, last week when Team Christina performed “Lady Marmalade,” the Page gained nearly 10,000 likes within a few minutes.
The Voice is about a journey, and Yaron says the NBC.com homepage has been focusing on “24/7 storytelling and continuing all of the reality stories and experiences of the artists and the coaches and the rivalries between them.” By cultivating the story online and providing a look behind the scenes, The Voice is becoming more than just a weekly television show — it’s nonstop entertainment online, complemented by an hour or two of live performances every week.
“The artists are not sequestered, they’re encouraged to talk about the show as much as they can,” Haislip says. “Regardless of how they do on the show, they still will come out of the competition with something that is going to help them in the future, and they’re all getting a huge leap ahead of the competition.”
That “something” Haislip refers to is digital savvy and a strong fanbase. From the minute they landed in LA for blind auditions, artists were given training in blogging and Facebook Pages and handed Samsung Galaxy Tabs and cameras to document everything from team dinners to rehearsals with photo and video. Each artist has his own hub on the site that links to a blog, Facebook, Twitter, video and photos — viewers really have the opportunity to be heavily invested in the show and the artists, and that translates to better ratings and higher engagement. Giving the artists free reign has let their personalities flourish — Beverly McClellan has started a fake talk show called, “What’s Up With That?” and Jared Blake captured his new ink session on video.
“This is something that every other reality show has kind of shied away from, but we feel really strongly about it,” says Yaron. “We are giving the artists the same platform that real musicians have. We’re training them and mirroring the new ways in which the music industry works. We’re giving them the tools to be the next Lady Gaga. It will help them stay in the competition and become successful music stars. We felt that it was time for a reality show to do that.”
While traditional shows like American Idol — and even The Voice of Holland — rely on calls and texts (Idol only recently launched Facebook voting) to log votes for contestants, The Voice has emphasized digital. Of course there’s the old standard of voting by phone, but there’s also an NBC Live app, NBC.com and an iTunes-driven voting platform. Instead of texting to vote, you can vote with your wallet and purchase your favorite songs, available from Universal Republic Records. Viewers can vote up to 10 times with each method, so the show encourages cross-platform engagement.
“The iTunes component was a huge part of the digital strategy — it’s an active vote,” says Yaron.
“The story of The Voice is not just an hour or two every week,” Yaron says. “It lives online all day and all week long, and it will continue all year long. This is a living, breathing entity, it’s not just show-based.”
And it might just be the future of television.
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download the Oneupweb sponsored Marketing Sherpa free study, “Measuring Social Media’s Contribution to the Bottom Line: 5 Tactics” to learn how to cut through the clutter and be sure to catch up with them on Facebook and Twitter.
- Twitter + Random Acts of Kindness = A Successful Social Campaign
– How Barbie & Ken Were Reunited by Social Media
– Lessons Learned From The Old Spice Campaign & Its Imitators
– Was the Charlie Sheen Tweet a Win for Internships.com?
– How SCVNGR’s First National Brand Partnership Scored Big During March Madness
More About: american idol, Behind the Social Media Campaign Series, nbc universal, social media, television, the-voice, trending, tv, twitter
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In January 2011, SCVNGR partnered with Buffalo Wild Wings (BWW) — at all 730 of its locations — for a 12-week campaign leading up to March Madness. The competitive game layer of SCVNGR worked well with the BWW patrons, who thrive on competition, community and games. SCVNGR’s SVP of Marketing Chris Mahl says that what differentiates SCVNGR from other location-based services is that it’s “not a checkin-based service, [but something] that goes further into brand goals [and] consumer goals.” The success of the campaign indicates that that may be true. BWW was the first national SCVNGR promotion, and in the first three weeks, the game accrued nearly 30,000 players. By the end, the campaign had 184,000 players at 730 BWW locations.
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb’s free whitepaper, “The Bloody Truth about Social Media.”SCVNGR is a location-based gaming platform –- there are challenges at every venue, and businesses can also “script” their own challenges. Customers can do challenges (take a photo, eat a certain dish) to earn points, which are redeemable for real-world rewards, such as a free drink or 10% off. The Cambridge-based company launched in 2008, and was founded by a 22-year old Princeton dropout who wanted to add a game layer to the world. And that he did.
The Concept
Interactive agency BFG drove the campaign and helped spread awareness of it via several avenues. BWW had several goals, including generating earned media and consumer engagement, improving customer return rates and, of course, driving revenue. By turning the act of watching games into a game in and of itself, these brand goals were accomplished in a fun, meaningful way.
Mahl attributes the success of the BWW promotion to a few things that created a sort of perfect storm for the campaign:
These guerilla marketing tactics made it so that when you walked in the door at BWW, there was no way you didn’t know what was happening. Plus, the March Madness-obsessed fans are a captive audience, and they were targeted in a comfortable, laid-back environment where they were already hanging out and drinking with friends, so it didn’t take much to get them involved.
BWW set up three custom challenges and offered restaurant rewards for those who completed. Rewards for completed challenges included $5 off (3 points), a free Coca-Cola (20 points) and free wings (30 points). Serving staff, having been trained with the app, were prepared to redeem rewards immediately, so the challenges and redemptions were happening in real time. If someone was hungry and wanted more wings, they could figure out a challenge that would earn them such wings and be much more fun than shelling over some green.
BWW’s challenges asked people to take pictures of their friends, the sauciest wing in the basket, fans of rival teams and the crowd going wild, to name a few. These photos were shared on the SCVNGR network, and many chose to share them on Facebook and Twitter, too.
The custom challenges allowed people to go from being players and participant to becoming “authors” — they weren’t just playing SCVNGR, they were “engaging with us” and creating their own adventures, Mahl says. SCVNGR gave them ownership to do what they wanted in order to earn points to unlock badges and rewards. Further, one could find the reward he or she wanted and figure out exactly what challenges needed to be done to get it. This kept people engaged in the game and the app, and spurred people to bring friends into the game, too.
Once a player completed the custom challenges scripted by BWW, he became a sort of power user who could create his own challenges. The user-generated challenges that were most popular floated to the top of the list, acting as a sort of crowdsourced filter. As with any crowdsourcing, there’s a risk of inappropriate or bizarre material, and though many of the BWW patrons are what Mahl describes as “edgy, passionate and strong personalities,” the user-generated challenges went slightly awry. But SCVNGR acted quickly and built a curation system to “keep it clean” and sift through the challenges twice a day to pull out any subpar challenges.
The campaign went well beyond the walls of each BWW location, too. A web-based leaderboard showed the point total for users on a national scale, spurring even more competition amongst players vying for the grand prize — a trip to the NBA finals with former Chicago Bulls player and Hall of Famer Scottie Pippen.
Here are some statistics from the three-month campaign:
“This kind of engagement just doesn’t exist,” says Mahl, referring to the stats from the BWW campaign. He adds that the campaign went off without a hitch — people were badged, recognized and unlocked their rewards. “Everything worked,” he says.
To boot, the successful campaign came at a “surprisingly low cost” to BWW, though Mahl would not disclose the exact figure. So what made it click?
“[The] BWW [campaign] was well-advertised,” says Mahl. “Sometimes you just don’t know there’s a game. BWW understood that and took the time to properly promote it and invited employees to play first.” Further, BWW is what Mahl calls a “socially progressive, community-based place,” which lends itself to the SCVNGR model. People come ready to play, with their game faces on.
Three months have passed, and BWW is refreshing its campaign as the “Flavor Fanatic Challenge.” Since BWW already has a player database of 184,000 people, BWW used the in-app invitation to get the March Madness players back in the game and back in their seats at BWW.
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb’s free whitepaper, “The Bloody Truth about Social Media” to learn how to cut through the clutter and be sure to catch up with them on Facebook and Twitter.
- Twitter + Random Acts of Kindness = A Successful Social Campaign
– How Social Media Helped Toy Story 3 Win at the Box Office
– Lessons Learned From The Old Spice Campaign & Its Imitators
– Was the Charlie Sheen Tweet a Win for Internships.com?
– Mattel Launches Digital Campaign Aiming To Reunite Barbie & Ken
More About: Behind the Social Media Campaign Series, Buffalo Wild Wings, business, march madness, MARKETING, Mobile 2.0, scvngr, social media, social media marketing, startups
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In January 2011, SCVNGR partnered with Buffalo Wild Wings (BWW) — at all 730 of its locations — for a 12-week campaign leading up to March Madness. The competitive game layer of SCVNGR worked well with the BWW patrons, who thrive on competition, community and games. SCVNGR’s SVP of Marketing Chris Mahl says that what differentiates SCVNGR from other location-based services is that it’s “not a checkin-based service, [but something] that goes further into brand goals [and] consumer goals.” The success of the campaign indicates that that may be true. BWW was the first national SCVNGR promotion, and in the first three weeks, the game accrued nearly 30,000 players. By the end, the campaign had 184,000 players at 730 BWW locations.
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb’s free whitepaper, “The Bloody Truth about Social Media.”SCVNGR is a location-based gaming platform –- there are challenges at every venue, and businesses can also “script” their own challenges. Customers can do challenges (take a photo, eat a certain dish) to earn points, which are redeemable for real-world rewards, such as a free drink or 10% off. The Cambridge-based company launched in 2008, and was founded by a 22-year old Princeton dropout who wanted to add a game layer to the world. And that he did.
The Concept
Interactive agency BFG drove the campaign and helped spread awareness of it via several avenues. BWW had several goals, including generating earned media and consumer engagement, improving customer return rates and, of course, driving revenue. By turning the act of watching games into a game in and of itself, these brand goals were accomplished in a fun, meaningful way.
Mahl attributes the success of the BWW promotion to a few things that created a sort of perfect storm for the campaign:
These guerilla marketing tactics made it so that when you walked in the door at BWW, there was no way you didn’t know what was happening. Plus, the March Madness-obsessed fans are a captive audience, and they were targeted in a comfortable, laid-back environment where they were already hanging out and drinking with friends, so it didn’t take much to get them involved.
BWW set up three custom challenges and offered restaurant rewards for those who completed. Rewards for completed challenges included $5 off (3 points), a free Coca-Cola (20 points) and free wings (30 points). Serving staff, having been trained with the app, were prepared to redeem rewards immediately, so the challenges and redemptions were happening in real time. If someone was hungry and wanted more wings, they could figure out a challenge that would earn them such wings and be much more fun than shelling over some green.
BWW’s challenges asked people to take pictures of their friends, the sauciest wing in the basket, fans of rival teams and the crowd going wild, to name a few. These photos were shared on the SCVNGR network, and many chose to share them on Facebook and Twitter, too.
The custom challenges allowed people to go from being players and participant to becoming “authors” — they weren’t just playing SCVNGR, they were “engaging with us” and creating their own adventures, Mahl says. SCVNGR gave them ownership to do what they wanted in order to earn points to unlock badges and rewards. Further, one could find the reward he or she wanted and figure out exactly what challenges needed to be done to get it. This kept people engaged in the game and the app, and spurred people to bring friends into the game, too.
Once a player completed the custom challenges scripted by BWW, he became a sort of power user who could create his own challenges. The user-generated challenges that were most popular floated to the top of the list, acting as a sort of crowdsourced filter. As with any crowdsourcing, there’s a risk of inappropriate or bizarre material, and though many of the BWW patrons are what Mahl describes as “edgy, passionate and strong personalities,” the user-generated challenges went slightly awry. But SCVNGR acted quickly and built a curation system to “keep it clean” and sift through the challenges twice a day to pull out any subpar challenges.
The campaign went well beyond the walls of each BWW location, too. A web-based leaderboard showed the point total for users on a national scale, spurring even more competition amongst players vying for the grand prize — a trip to the NBA finals with former Chicago Bulls player and Hall of Famer Scottie Pippen.
Here are some statistics from the three-month campaign:
“This kind of engagement just doesn’t exist,” says Mahl, referring to the stats from the BWW campaign. He adds that the campaign went off without a hitch — people were badged, recognized and unlocked their rewards. “Everything worked,” he says.
To boot, the successful campaign came at a “surprisingly low cost” to BWW, though Mahl would not disclose the exact figure. So what made it click?
“[The] BWW [campaign] was well-advertised,” says Mahl. “Sometimes you just don’t know there’s a game. BWW understood that and took the time to properly promote it and invited employees to play first.” Further, BWW is what Mahl calls a “socially progressive, community-based place,” which lends itself to the SCVNGR model. People come ready to play, with their game faces on.
Three months have passed, and BWW is refreshing its campaign as the “Flavor Fanatic Challenge.” Since BWW already has a player database of 184,000 people, BWW used the in-app invitation to get the March Madness players back in the game and back in their seats at BWW.
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb’s free whitepaper, “The Bloody Truth about Social Media” to learn how to cut through the clutter and be sure to catch up with them on Facebook and Twitter.
- Twitter + Random Acts of Kindness = A Successful Social Campaign
– How Social Media Helped Toy Story 3 Win at the Box Office
– Lessons Learned From The Old Spice Campaign & Its Imitators
– Was the Charlie Sheen Tweet a Win for Internships.com?
– Mattel Launches Digital Campaign Aiming To Reunite Barbie & Ken
More About: Behind the Social Media Campaign Series, Buffalo Wild Wings, business, march madness, MARKETING, Mobile 2.0, scvngr, social media, social media marketing, startups
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On the heels of its successful and well-received Ford Fiesta Movement and 2011 Explorer Facebook reveal initiatives, Ford has crafted yet another innovative social media campaign, this time to raise awareness and introduce consumers to the 2012 Focus. At the center of the campaign is Doug, an irreverent and absurd tweeting, Facebook updating and YouTube uploading sock puppet serving as the spokesperson for the new car. Ford has constructed multifaceted fictional characters in Doug and John. John is Doug’s human companion — the straight man of duo. Doug’s comedic, brazen and off-the-cuff personality is the perfect foil for John’s more factually-grounded act. Together, they flit about the country in a new Focus, frequently updating their social media accounts with an assortment of content and playful banter. The idea, says Digital Marketing Manager Scott Kelly, whose team is responsible for the campaign, is to use social channels as a medium to create invitational content. “Doug is a multilayered character that’s more fun to get to know in an interactive setting. A 30-second TV spot could never afford us the opportunity to engage with our consumers the way the social channels do,” says Kelly. “The videos are an introduction to him and John, but the real fun begins when people can talk to Doug and have him talk back.” Untraditional and the opposite of politically correct, this social media and content-heavy campaign is the riskiest one yet for Ford. Ford, widely regarded as a digitally savvy brand, is not guaranteed a home run with each swing. And with fictional characters engaging with brand fans, an outspoken sock puppet with a big mouth, and an agency that manages the social media updates, Ford is asking for trouble. Anything and everything could go wrong. Mashable spoke with Kelly extensively to get a behind-the-scenes look at the campaign and a progress report on how its going.
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb’s free whitepaper, “The Bloody Truth about Social Media.”Brands are littering Facebook, Twitter and YouTube with run-of-the-mill social media campaigns. Many are guilty of replicating the ideas of their more ambitious competitors while others simply hope to get additional mileage out of television spots by placing them on YouTube. Not Ford.
Who is Doug?
In understanding Ford’s motives for the spokespuppet campaign, one must first understand who Doug is and what he represents.
“Doug is the latest addition to a long history of spokespeople for Ford,” Kelly says. “Like the 100 agents from the Fiesta Movement, he’s someone who’s been loaned a Focus for a certain period of time and expected to get the word out about what is, essentially, a brand-new car.”
Doug is symbolic of the redesigned Focus — he’s the opposite of what you’d expect. “The 2012 Focus is nothing like the past Focus, and Doug is supposed to serve as a provocateur who gets people to take a left turn in their day,” says Kelly.
The company intentionally made Doug a sock puppet so he could say and do things that might not be acceptable from a human spokesperson. Doug is Ford’s license to walk on the wild side.
Add to that John, “the straight man to Doug’s occasional absurdity,” as Kelly describes him, and you have a comedic pair in balance.
“[John] is the one with the real knowledge of the vehicle, so he can correct misinformation when Doug says something like, ‘Every new Focus comes with an ejector seat and a license plate changer,’” says Kelly. “Basically, he acts as a liaison of decency between Doug and the public, as well as letting us interject some vehicle features in a natural way.”
The ongoing campaign, launched in March and set to run through fall and possibly until the end of 2011, is quite intricate.
Here’s a rundown of who’s involved:
The show is an always-on production. Doug uploads videos to YouTube once or twice weekly. The videos spawn a slew of responses from viewers, and responses are weaved into the plot as both Doug and John engage with fans. With the campaign so heavily tied to social media, Ford rarely lets Doug rest.
“[Doug's] Facebook and Twitter channels are buzzing on an hourly basis — even on the weekends,” says Kelly. “We try not to leave fans hanging for too long without some sort of response.”
Producing campaigns for social media is perceived to be a cheaper affair, but as you can surmise Ford’s not pinching pennies on this one.
“This is roughly what we would spend on a TV campaign that would produce 3 to 5 commercials,” says Kelly. “Yet we’re producing a lot more content and having a more engaged conversation — more bang for the buck.”
Anecdotally, the campaign is a hit. Kelly shares that while the company wasn’t anticipating a one-to-one correlation between consumer exposure to the campaign and a new Focus purchase, it has seen brand converts — it’s most coveted buyer — post to Doug’s wall announcing their new car purchases and giving Doug all the credit.
Those few Wall posts make for great stories, but they’re more flashy than they are indicative of real success.
We asked Kelly what the specific goals of the campaign are and how the company planned to measure success. Ford, he says, primarily set out to “raise awareness and increase consideration for the all-new Focus.”
Ford plans to measure whether it’s met this objective by surveying people who were exposed to the campaign, he says.
“We’re also measuring that success via engagement with our videos and ad units, and sentiment for the 2012 Focus and Doug.”
So far, so good, he reports. Here’s a breakdown of how Doug is doing:
Goal: 10,000 total Facebook fans
Actual: 35,650 Facebook fans in four weeks
Goal: 2.5 million YouTube video views
Actual:
More Stats:
Plus, 41% of all the online conversation about the 2012 Focus is related to Doug and the campaign. “We definitely see this as a successful measure of driving incremental conversation about Focus by using Doug,” Kelly asserts.
“The campaign’s style of humor is definitely working — smart, subtle humor as opposed to broad slapstick seems to resonate with the consumers we’ve wanted to reach,” Kelly concludes. “And many of them have admitted to going to take a test-drive because of Doug or actually buying a new Focus.”
Disclosure: Ford is a Mashable sponsor.
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb’s free whitepaper, “The Bloody Truth about Social Media” to learn how to cut through the clutter and be sure to catch up with them on Facebook and Twitter.
- How Barbie & Ken Were Reunited by Social Media
– Twitter + Random Acts of Kindness = A Successful Social Campaign
– How Social Media Helped Toy Story 3 Win at the Box Office
– Lessons Learned From The Old Spice Campaign & Its Imitators
– Was the Charlie Sheen Tweet a Win for Internships.com?
More About: 2012 ford focus, Behind the Social Media Campaign Series, ford, ford focus, MARKETING, social media campaign, trending
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In celebration of Ken’s 50th anniversary and just in time for the Valentine’s Day release of its Sweet Talkin’ Ken doll, Mattel launched a grandiose marketing campaign to reunite its iconic doll couple, Barbie and Ken. We spoke with Lauren Bruksch, director of Barbie marketing at Mattel, to get the inside scoop on the success of the campaign’s social media components.
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb’s free whitepaper, “The Bloody Truth about Social Media.”Exactly seven years after their controversial split on Valentine’s Day in 2004, America’s favorite plastic lovebirds reunited, sending the socialverse down memory lane.
The Campaign
As with all integrated marketing programs, the Barbie and Ken reunion campaign took a village to produce. Attention, Ketchum Public Relations and Mattel‘s internal marketing, design and digital media teams worked together to pull it all off.
Billed as Ken’s new year’s resolution to win Barbie back, the campaign was heavy on social media marketing, utilizing Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and YouTube to spread its message.
BarbieandKen.com was the hub of the campaign, where users could vote on whether Barbie should “take Ken back” or not. The site features a Love-O-Meter, gauging voters’ feelings on the topic. (Now that the campaign has ended, the page now redirects to Barbie’s Facebook page.)
Mattel managed separate social accounts for each doll across various platforms during the campaign. On Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, fans could follow Ken’s adventures as he attempted to woo Barbie back into his arms.
Of course, this love story isn’t complete without a damsel in distress. Barbie’s Twitter and Facebook accounts were flowing with updates about Ken’s grand gestures and requests for suggestions about how she should handle the situation.
Since reuniting, the two now share Barbie’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, “hopefully forever,” tweeted Ken. To minimize confusion, Ken’s updates are signed with “-Ken.”
Mattel also launched a web series on Hulu called Genuine Ken, featuring host Whitney Port and eight “Ken-testants” competing for the title of “The Great American Boyfriend.”
Mattel’s campaign to reunite Barbie and Ken was one of the most integrated campaigns in recent months. In conjunction with the digital and social media tactics employed, the brand put on a slew of offline stunts, including a “Catch Me If You Ken” outing that featured a pack of smoldering hot Ken doll models at last year’s NYC Fashion’s Night Out event. Ken was also spotted at New York’s Magnolia Bakery, designing a special cupcake for Barbie, which was available for purchase through Valentine’s Day.
Keeping up the sweet trend, Mattel went all-out at famous candy shop Dylan’s Candy Bar. The windows of Dylan’s Manhattan flagship were decked out in Ken-branded Valentine’s Day candy, and the store carried a number of Barbie and Ken products for the holiday.
The brand paired its online efforts with a mix of traditional media buys. Billboards of Ken professing his love to Barbie were erected in New York and Los Angeles, and a two-page spread was placed in Us Weekly, published on Valentine’s Day (pictured at right).
During the campaign, a video (embedded above) was posted to Barbie’s YouTube page, showing Ken creating a profile on the dating site Match.com, only to find that Barbie is his perfect match.
“What we love about the Match.com video in particular is that it allowed us to, again, showcase the realness of the relationship between Barbie and Ken as romantic dolls in 2011,” says Bruksch. “Barbie and Ken, being the modern dolls they are, would have checked out online dating sites. They, of course, would be on Facebook, browsing through their upcoming Facebook events and checking out the occasional Facebook ad … just like the rest of us!”
The video was the icing on the cake for this campaign. Mattel approached online dating with realistic ideas of how people meet and communicate on the web. Bruksch explains why digital dating played such a role in the duo’s reunion:
“The way the reunion came about was not unlike many other modern romances that are often documented and shared via many social media channels. Many can likely relate to many of the moments that Barbie and Ken shared — such as writing a flirty status update in hopes of gaining the attention of an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, running into an ex at an event and tweeting the surprise encounter, testing out the online dating waters … these are all common social actions in today’s dating world.
“What did Barbie do today? Has she run into Ken? How did she react to the cupcakes Ken commissioned for her at Magnolia Bakery?
“All these aspects of Barbie’s and Ken’s lives are displayed through YouTube videos, Foursquare tips, TwitPics, Facebook updates, blog posts … where one would expect to find them in their own lives. If someone created cupcakes for you with a delicious bakery, would you not show them off on Facebook?
“The Barbie and Ken modern love story was a delightful (doll-ightful!) one to tell through social media, and we’re ecstatic that the two are — rightfully — united once again.”
“The strategy was to leverage Barbie and Ken’s various social channels to authentically share moments and insights into their romance as they began to find their way back to each other and emerge as the ultimate Roman-TECH couple,” explains Bruksch.
The campaign was a huge success across each social platform it employed. During the reunion courtship, lasting from early January to February 14, Barbie’s Facebook Page experienced a 34% increase in fans and a 200% increase in engagement, through comments, likes and shares. Bruksch notes that this enhanced engagement has sustained post-campaign.
Mattel utilized Twitter to share tidbits from Barbie and Ken’s romantic journey. Bruksch says, “Whether it was a Twitpic of Barbie noticing one of Ken’s grand gestures in Us Weekly magazine or Ken sharing his Match.com online dating search with his fans, every key moment in their romantic journey was captured and shared via links, pictures, tweets, video clips.” The flowing content got followers excited about sharing the couple’s news. On February 14, the reunion day, the words “Barbie” and “Ken” were tweeted every two minutes, and #BarbieandKen was a trending topic in 15 cities, including New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago and San Francisco.
BarbieandKen.com, the hub for the campaign, “was a great destination for [fans] to learn about the Barbie and Ken romance, share their own content around the romance and help determine what might happen next,” says Bruksch, noting that “the crowdsourcing of the voting was central to the narrative of their journey.” The page garnered more than 5 million pageviews, and hundreds of thousands of users voted on whether Barbie and Ken should rekindle their flame.
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb’s free whitepaper, “The Bloody Truth about Social Media” to learn how to cut through the clutter and be sure to catch up with them on Facebook and Twitter.
- Twitter + Random Acts of Kindness = A Successful Social Campaign
– How Social Media Helped Toy Story 3 Win at the Box Office
– Lessons Learned From The Old Spice Campaign & Its Imitators
– Was the Charlie Sheen Tweet a Win for Internships.com?
– Mattel Launches Digital Campaign Aiming To Reunite Barbie & Ken
More About: barbie, Behind the Social Media Campaign Series, business, digital marketing, MARKETING, online marketing, social media, social media marketing
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When it comes to brand building, there are basically two schools of thought: “Build it and they will come” and “brainwash the masses.”
The latter is based on the belief that any publicity is good publicity. If you get your name out there, the rest will fall in to place. A good example of this philosophy is GoldenPalace.com, which recently bought Justin Bieber’s hair, and in the past has purchased William Shatner’s kidney stone for the free publicity.
At the moment, Internships.com fits the latter category as well. If you’ve heard of the brand, it’s most likely due to a single effective marketing campaign: An endorsement by Charlie Sheen via Twitter.
When Sheen joined Twitter on March 1, it’s safe to say he wasn’t a great fit with a lot of brands. Sheen had just had a major falling out with Chuck Lorre, the producer of Sheen’s hit show Two and a Half Men and gave a series of bizarre interviews. It was clear that the star was something of a train wreck, and, to many, a fascinating one at that. Sheen became a trending topic on Twitter and, when he joined, set the Guinness World Record by getting 1 million followers in about 25 hours.
That combination of public pariah and social media star had appeal for a brand that was chiefly concerned with creating awareness. But Internships.com and Sheen needed a matchmaker.
That’s where Ad.ly came in. Founded in 2009 by Sean Rad, Ad.ly sought to link celebrities with social media endorsements. The firm first came on a lot of people’s radars when it arranged for client Kim Kardashian to receive $10,000 per tweet for spreading the message about Carl’s Jr., a fast food chain. By now, Ad.ly claims more than 1,000 celebrities, who make endorsements on behalf of some 150 brands.
As it so happens, Internships.com’s CEO, Robin Richards, sits on Ad.ly’s board. Nevertheless, the year-old company — which connects internship seekers with companies offering internships — had some stipulations for working with Ad.ly and Sheen. “There were two things we needed to make sure of,” says Kat Garcia, a rep for Internships.com. “We needed to make sure this was a legitimate internship and it was a paid internship.”
The eight-week internship is real, but it’s a little odd — the winner gets to manage Charlie Sheen’s social media operations. It also pays — $10 an hour.
With those specifications in place, Sheen gave his tweet/plug on March 7: “I’m looking to hire a #winning INTERN with #TigerBlood. Apply here – http://bit.ly/hykQQF #TigerBloodIntern #internship #ad.”
The response to Sheen’s tweet was immediate. Within the first hour, the tweet got 95,333 clicks. A week later, the offer got more than 82,000 replies. “It’s been overwhelming in a positive way,” Garcia says.
While the promotion was undeniably successful in getting responses to the internship, it’s not clear that Internships.com can build a brand off of it. The company, which had previously only run paid search advertising and the occasional print ad, is now known to most people as an extension of the Charlie Sheen brand.
Rob Frankel, a Los Angeles-based branding expert, says that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but that this appears to be nothing more or less than a publicity stunt. “Awareness for awareness’s sake never works,” he says. “Cancer has a high awareness, but how many people want it?” Frankel says he believes that an attention-getting strategy is fine as long as it ties in with what the brand is offering — for him, the fact that the promotion is around a Charlie Sheen internship doesn’t cut it.
When asked if there are potential downfalls to being yoked to Sheen — what if he dies for instance? — Lindsay Plotkin, another rep for Internships.com, sidestepped the question, focusing instead on what the promotion has meant for Internships’s brand. “It kind of propelled us from maybe not being as well known to being a contender in this space,” she says.
Potential concerns aside, Internships.com still has control of some of the message. One of the cleverer aspects of the campaign is that a single tweet launched a story arc for Internships.com. After narrowing down the field, the winner of the contest should be announced in a few weeks, no doubt providing more free publicity. After that, it will be up to Internships.com to plan what it will do with its newfound awareness. When asked, however, if anyone has successfully built a brand with publicity stunts, Frankel thought for a second. “I can’t think of anyone that has,” he said. “That should tell you something.”
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb’s free whitepaper, “The Bloody Truth about Social Media” to learn how to cut through the clutter and be sure to catch up with them on Facebook and Twitter.
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More About: advertising, Behind the Social Media Campaign Series, charlie sheen, Internships.com, MARKETING, twitter
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The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb’s free whitepaper, “The Bloody Truth about Social Media.”
Charles Caleb Colton once said, “Imitation is the sincerest (form) of flattery.” Obviously, Mr. Colton was not talking about the success of the Old Spice campaign (seeing as how he lived during the 1700s), but we’re sure he would have reiterated that sentiment were he to see how many spinoffs the aforementioned marketing miracle has inspired.
The campaign launched just over a year ago — centered around the theme “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” — and captured the imagination of the public. Case in point: The original ad has garnered more than 30 million views to date on YouTube.
In July, the whole deal kicked it up a notch higher with the Old Spice “Responses” campaign, an online blitz during which a team of techies, marketers and writers pumped out more than 180 personalized videos featuring “The Old Spice Guy,” Isaiah Mustafa, responding to questions posed by fans, bloggers and celebs alike.
“We were working with creative on a way to use Isaiah, who was very popular in the social media realm,” says Eric Kallman, a copywriter at Wieden + Kennedy, the agency behind the campaign. “Iain Tait [global interactive executive creative director at Wieden + Kennedy] noticed how many comments he got on the videos,” Kallman says, referring to YouTube. From there, the idea to respond to those comments was born.
And that idea, incidentally, was extremely successful. “It was being able to interact with this guy,” says Craig Allen, the campaign’s art director. “You can play with him like you can a toy.”
According to Visible Measures, “Old Spice Responses” is one of the fastest-growing online video campaigns of all time. The company compares the endeavor to some of the most popular viral videos to date below, and how they’ve grown over the course of 24 hours (to be fair, “Old Spice Responses” had a time limit attached, so there was more urgency to participate with this particular string of videos than there was to get in on, say, the Susan Boyle craze). Check out the graph below for the details.
“This campaign revamped the awareness of Old Spice,” says Kallman. “People called Isaiah ‘The Old Spice Guy.’ It got people saying the name of the brand.” It also, apparently, impelled people to start pouring money into the brand. In July, Brandweek reported substantial growth in sales of Old Spice Body Wash around the time of the “Responses” campaign.
And if increased sales and positive buzz weren’t enough, the original ad took home a Creative Emmy Award for Best Commercial of the Year. Not bad for a spot hawking body wash.
This success also earned Old Spice a legion of students, as it were — folks who cribbed ideas from the ads and applied them to their own marketing efforts. Mashable chatted with a few of these businesses — who have all enjoyed success from following the Old Spice model — about what aspects of the campaign worked for them.
Interacting With ConsumersRegardless of your political affiliation, you’ve probably noticed that the White House et. al. have been ramping up their social media efforts of late, with the likes of U.S. President Barack Obama and former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs answering questions on YouTube.
Well, the House Republicans followed this trend — working in their own Old Spice twist — following this year’s State of the Union Address, recording videos after the speech that responded directly to Twitter questions and commentary via Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s YouTube channel.
“The key [to the State of the Union] is the response afterward,” says Matt Lira, director of new media for Cantor. “Lots of reporters swarm to ask questions. So when we saw the Old Spice campaign, we thought it would work for us. The Old Spice campaign validates the community. Users liked getting responses.”
Lira says the campaign was extremely useful for the House Republicans, and they would most certainly use it again.
This is customer service at its most immediate and entertaining, and although the GOP wasn’t sporting a towel whilst delivering comments, we can see this model being very attractive to political parties and businesses alike in the future.
Leveraging InfluencersOne of the reasons why the Old Spice campaign went so viral was that it targeted folks who were influential in the online sphere: people who would blog about it and share the videos on their own channels and sites (see: Perez Hilton, Alyssa Milano, etc). Those people then acted as brand advocates (whether intentionally or not), spreading the gospel of Old Spice to their followers.
Hot on the heels of the Old Spice endeavor in July, Cisco decided to try out the “Responses” format in an effort to connect with its key clients and influencers via parody. (Sadly, the web at large — including Mashable — misread the parody as a blatant copycat attempt, and reacted scornfully. But we digress.)
“We didn’t necessarily do a campaign, it was much more of a parody on it,” says Doug Webster, senior director of service provider marketing at Cisco. “We market very large, powerful routers and switches. Most of the issues that we deal with on our blog are very technical and very detailed. But we do try to mix things up a little bit, so we thought that it would be unique to send shoutouts to key influencers who read our blog regularly. It was meant to be a parody targeted toward those key influencers.”
Cisco’s mascot was not a hot man in a towel, but the rather dour-looking “Ted from Accounting.” Cisco fans were encouraged to visit the Cisco Twitter accounts — @CiscoSPMobility, @CiscoSPVideo and @CiscoSP360 — and tweet at Ted with the hashtag #CiscoSPice. They could also comment on the blog in order to get a personalized video. In total, Ted made 19 videos.
“We got great feedback,” Webster says. “One of the [respondents] said he almost wet his pants. The campaign was full of inside jokes with them. It was a much more targeted area. I wouldn’t necessary look at this as something that was intended to drive sales, because unlike body wash, we sell things that are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, it is important for us to have ongoing engagement with these key influencers.”
Revitalizing Brand ImageI think we can all agree that prior to “The Old Spice Guy,” the brand mostly evoked thoughts of dad, grandpas and other less-than-sexy relations. By changing the face of Old Spice to a dude in a towel (and therefore appealing to women as well as men), the brand was revitalized.
Andia Winslow, founder of ADUB365 FIT, decided to adopt the character of “The Old Spice Guy” for her own purposes: Creating a brand image for her fitness business that was sexy and aspirational.
“‘The Old Spice Guy’ is not only highly popular, but he is possibly one of the most recognized advertising characters in recent memory,” she says. “He is fine, he is fun, he is fit! I hired an actor to appear in my fitness video series to portray ‘The Old Spice Guy,’ and he too is all of the above! I wanted to portray both the fun and sexy side of fitness.”
“My business is very new and my major goals for 2011 are to build brand awareness and industry credibility and to attract major sponsors and partners,” she says. “My goal, simply put, is to grow and engage my audience in unique ways. The OSG video — once posted — yielded more immediate response than any other in my series. Not only did it achieve more unique views in a faster period of time than any other, but viewers related to me that they ‘watched the whole way through.’”
Now while we commend Winslow’s ability to tap into current trends to leverage her brand, we wouldn’t recommend making her “Old Spice Guy” a permanent fixture (seeing as how he is, in fact, “The Old Spice Guy”). However, the notion of connecting a fitting face to your business is one that the original campaign has proven to be successful.
Making Your Brand ShareableThe Old Spice ads are infinitely shareable — especially those featuring popular viral themes such as online marriage proposals — a concept that Brittney Maxfield, corporate communications manager at VitalSmarts, adopted when creating an Old Spice-themed campaign for the book Crucial Conversations.
“We wanted to ‘ride the wave’ of the Old Spice popularity,” says Maxfield. “We knew people would search YouTube for Old Spice content and wanted to take advantage of the key words and natural interest of potentially new prospects.”
“Our audience loved our Old Spice parody geared to the holiday season,” she adds. “We had nearly 30,000 of our fans watch our video and we also invited them to share via their own social media channels.”
Since the video had to do with talking to your relatives during the holidays, Maxfield pitched Fox & Friends a story dealing with that subject, and she offered them the parody. The TV show aired the video (sans charge of course), a spot that would usually be quite costly.
In this case, Maxfield created something that was marketable beyond the product she was selling, which makes the concept of advertising much more attractive to consumers — a concept that the original Old Spice campaign also embraced. In this way, her product message went much farther than traditional venues, reaching a much wider potential customer base.
Series Supported by Oneupweb
The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, an award-winning agency specializing in search marketing, social media and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download Oneupweb’s free whitepaper, “The Bloody Truth about Social Media” to learn how to cut through the clutter and be sure to catch up with them on Facebook and Twitter.
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More About: Behind the Social Media Campaign Series, branding, cisco, features, MARKETING, old spice, video, viral video
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