Impressions

Social Media has allowed marketers to amplify the impact of live consumer engagements and events. Sometimes, it may seem like all you need is a unique idea, a video camera and a YouTube account. However, the engagements that really work for brands require a more thorough approach. As our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls fill up with shared content, the competition for audience and share capital will only increase. Here’s a look at some live engagement campaigns that worked and some of the keys to successful live engagement marketing.

National Geographic Channel Augmented Reality Installation

Live Augmented Reality for National Geographic Channel / UPC from Appshaker Ltd on Vimeo.

Interactivity Creates the Activation

Live Engagements need to be interactive. The live ‘audience’ create the activation and the audience that views the event either later or remotely get their enjoyment partly by imagining themselves in the live situation. Therefore, good live engagements need hooks that are designed to encourage participation from people to whom the target consumer will relate.

This National Geographic Channel engagement produced by Appshaker could be more slick, but it does this most important job very well. The content that will be viewed and shared post-event is being created by live consumer interaction.

Contrex Street Engagement

The Live Audience Tells the Story

Not only does the live audience create the content for other viewers, they are that content. One of the most powerful aspects of live engagement marketing is the ability to connect positive feelings with the brand in the mind of consumers.

Look at the faces of the women in this video of an inspired Contrex engagement. Just watching them react makes the viewer want to smile. Another great example of this is the Coca-Cola Happiness Machine activation. What would you give as a marketer to have your brand associated with these genuine feelings?

T-Mobile Angry Birds Live

Create Concepts That Get Noticed

Getting play (whether broadly or with a specific audience)  is perhaps the primary goal of live engagements. An idea that resonates first with the live participants and then with a wider audience is what makes the difference. When we re-purpose and distribute the content that our live engagements generate, we are asking other people to expend share capital to help us disseminate our material. This applies to news editors who might choose to run a spot about a campaign as well as to individuals who we want to like or share our content through social media. Our end of this transaction is to provide compelling content that delivers value: value to the viewer as entertainment, interest, information, etc. and additional value to them as a social asset that benefits them when they share it.

Our share-able content has to audition along with all the other content our viewers might pass on, so making an impression is key. In the age-old tradition of Big Props Are Funny, this live action Angry Birds engagement delivers.

Bacardi Projection Mapping

Get the Audience to Contribute

Getting the live audience to make a personal investment in the engagement is a great way to encourage both participation and sharing. User-submitted content personalizes the experience. It also creates a greater connection between the brand and consumer. Live event participants can provide a strong catalyst for future communications, particularly in large numbers. Their submissions provide marketers with a direct communication channel for follow-up and more incentive to the audience to further engage with the brand and share content.

Picture submission is a classic way to do achieve those goals. This Bacardi activation gives those participants a strong incentive to provide content and make the connection.

Heineken Italy Guerilla Activation

Successful Distribution Takes Work

It’s important to understand that successful live engagement campaigns don’t happen by accident. The right concept, execution, and tactics are vital. Part of this approach must include careful planning of how the engagement will be broadcast to a wider audience. Systematically identifying all the distribution channels and determining how content will be packaged and delivered to maximize views with the target audience is key. In fact, this is not very different from what the process of event PR has always been. The biggest difference is that the web and social media mean that we now have millions of one-person media outlets that we are soliciting to broadcast our message.

This bragging reel for a brilliant Heineken Guerrilla activation shows the results the campaign achieved through traditional and social media. Results that came from media partnerships and PR leg-work.

What to remember

These campaigns are good examples of some of the basics of successful live engagement marketing:

1. Include interactivity
2. The audience is the message (apologies to Mr. McLuhan)
3. Be audacious
4. Solicit user-submitted content
5. Plan your distribution

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of what makes a successful Live Engagement Campaign, but these basic ingredients are important aspects of most effective activations.

Impressions have long been a key metric for measuring marketing reach and value. As we are all aware, this measurement is becoming less meaningful all the time as new channels and marketing tactics create a more fragmented media landscape. Still, impressions are used to gauge the relative audience size when we think we are comparing apples to apples (or are just being lazy). It’s fairly straightforward to assume that this is a useful comparison when analyzing various campaigns. However, even within a single platform, impressions can be a misleading figure. Your brand’s Facebook ad will get impressions. So will someone liking your page or posting a comment. Certainly the Facebook impressions from these actions are not all of equal value to your brand. Indeed, many of the impressions we count have no relation to a consumer view.

While various advertising media have implemented standards for measuring impressions (most recently guidelines produced by the Interactive Advertising Bureau) the need to determine an evaluation metric that is more meaningfully connected to consumer reaction is driving marketers to measures of consumer engagement, as well. The recent upgrade to Facebook insights implemented by Wildfire Interactive Inc. are specifically designed to provide marketers with a better understanding of how consumers are engaging with their brands on the platform.

Major brands are also making significant changes in their methodology for measuring return on marketing investment. In a recent article on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network, Joe Tripodi, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer at Coca-Cola describes the brand’s move to measure “consumer expressions” in addition to impressions.

“By definition, impressions are passive. They give us no real sense of engagement, and consumer engagement with our brands is ultimately what we’re striving to achieve. Awareness is fine, but advocacy will take your business to the next level.” – Joe Tripodi, Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola is systematically leveraging the data they gather through interactive marketing and social media to provide insights into their consumers. However, they are still treating all consumer engagements as equal when tallying the impact of their campaigns for number of “consumer expressions”.

At With Intent, we take advantage of the uniquely measurable aspects of social media, and live and interactive marketing to go a step further. We call our key metric “Quality Engagements”. For every campaign or program, we begin by determining specific and measurable objectives. These could be awareness, sales, loyalty, consideration, etc. We then identify how the target consumer is motivated to act in ways that contribute to those objectives. A typical “Quality Engagement” will have between two and five components or actions, each of which must be fulfilled in order for the consumer interaction to count as a “Quality Engagement”.

In this way we get the value of a simple comparison figure that is more directly connected to measurable return on marketing investment. We are also able to drill-down in our data and quantify what specific tactics deliver return for various types of objective and consumer profile.

Of course, “impression” also means “An idea, feeling, or opinion about something or someone, esp. one formed without conscious thought or on the basis of little evidence” and we will be using this space to share our off-the-cuff impressions of Consumer Engagement Marketing in the world.

We hope you will enjoy our posts and encourage you to let us know what you think.

Image: Stephen Simeon / SimeonPhoto.com

Image: sheelamohan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net