CHAPTER 5

Real-Time Marketing in a Visual World

Your brand is turning 100 years old, and you want to celebrate. You also want to show that your brand is just as relevant to its customers as it has always been, but how do you make the centenary commemoration strike a chord with a younger, more tech-aware audience? The classic cookie producer Oreo managed to achieve all of this—and to win new fans in the process.

In 2012, over 100 days—one for each year of the brand’s history—Oreo’s creative team crafted an image that reflected one of the day’s trending news stories. Called the Daily Twist, the story would be given a playful and fun Oreo theme and shared across the brand’s social media channels with the hashtag #DailyTwist.

This example of a brand’s agility, on-the-fly thinking, and in a lot of cases, fast response showcases what has recently been referred to as real-time marketing (RTM), agile marketing, on-the-fly marketing, or real-time social response. Oreo listened to what was important to its audience, and within hours the creative team put together a visual that showed Oreo’s take on it. Of course, some events could have been anticipated in advance, such as a holiday or a film release, but others such as a Loch Ness Monster photo hitting the news or five gold medals won in a day at the Olympics were created in response to the current events that were important to Oreo’s audience.

Oreo created images that celebrated everything from national holidays to real-time events with image titles reading “Talk like a pirate day,” “National radio day,” “Elvis week,” “Mars Rover lands,” “Horse dance goes viral,” “Pride,” “Anniversary of first high five,” “National Bullying Prevention month,” “The Dark Knight rises in theaters tomorrow,” “Comic-Con begins,” and so on. You can find the full collection of images here: http://www.pinterest.com/oreo/daily-twist.

How did social media respond to the Daily Twist images?

Over the campaign there were 433 million Facebook views with an increase in shares of 280%, creating 231 million media impressions and making Oreo the brand with the highest buzz increase in 2012 (+49%). The campaign also won one of the two Cyber Grand Prix awards at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity.¹

Picture behind the scenes at a brand such as Oreo that has integrated real-time marketing into its strategy: marketing departments flexible enough to respond to events as they happen and tailor their marketing accordingly; to monitor customer opinion and tweak campaigns in the light of it; to make product decisions based on data collected minute by minute; to be able to put together an accurate picture of how products and campaigns are received—not just with sales figures but with accurate social media data from actual or potential customers.

There is a gold mine of social data available to marketing departments, but it takes the right tools, analytics, and mostly, the right mentality to make use of it. Brands that are changing their marketing strategies to integrate real-time social listening and social data are beginning to see the results—but it’s still in the early days, and many companies aren’t yet convinced that its of relevance to them. The sorts of examples that are frequently held up—clever images that reference a current event that go viral on Twitter—might not seem significant to many organizations. But RTM goes deeper than humorous visual responses or witty videos. It’s about responsiveness, truly knowing your customers, and taking a flexible approach to marketing.

Think what that could mean to a brand:

• Serving customers relevant advertising messages that they may truly be interested in

• Personalized customer service

• Research, development, or alteration of products based on an in-depth knowledge of customer needs

• Instant access to a wealth of real-time market research

• Marketing campaigns that reflect the public mood or even set new trends

• Connecting with potential customers based on their social profiles and conversations

We are at the beginning of a new era in marketing, one that has its finger on the pulse of consumers and can make decisions and implement them rapidly. We have an ability to know our customers as never before: what they want, what they are saying, and how they are thinking.

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Why are we devoting a whole chapter of this book on the topic of visual marketing to RTM specifically? Because so many RTM strategies and tactics—and certainly almost all of the best ones—involve rich media. As you can see from the Oreos example above, to be truly effective, brands are using images, videos, and infographics as a real-time social response, based on the current interests and needs of their audiences.

© Courtesy of Daimler AG.

What Is Real-Time Marketing?

Constant, relevant content creation can be hard work for brands.

But Smart Car shows just how realtime marketing techniques can inspire ideas for creative content—and turn product criticism into an opportunity to drive engagement and share important product data at the same time.

In June 2012 Clayton Hove, creative director for an ad agency in North Dakota, sent the tweet you see above, left.

What was Smart Car’s inspired response?

“Couldn’t have been one bird, @adtothebone. Sounds more like 4.5 million. Seriously, we did the math.” And they attached the infographic showing exactly that math.

The clever graph, which showed exactly how much bird crap it would take to damage a Smart Car’s safety cell (specifically 4.5 million pigeon craps; 360,00 turkey craps; 45,000 emu craps), got five times as many retweets as the original post, and it got a lot of media attention as well. What’s more, it showed that the car manufacturer has a great sense of humor and doesn’t shy away from showing the brand’s fun side. After all, everybody loves to laugh. And what people love more than a good laugh is the knowledge that brands have confidence in their products, which this funny infographic showed very clearly. Including the variety of bird species was also a nice touch.⁴

Well played, Smart Car. The brand’s clever response was rewarded by the tweet you see on the right from Hove.

In the blog post, to which he linked in his response tweet, Hove called brand’s response “INFOGRAPHANTASTIC.” It isn’t every day your brand’s tweet inspires others to come up with the new word to describe it. Plus, Hove noted that this ingenious move by Smart Car made him rethink his perception of the brand. Not bad.

But is the smart social response all there is to real-time marketing, or is there something more?

Real-time marketing is no different from what good marketing has always been about—so why do we need a fancy new phrase for it?

The Rise of Real-Time Marketing

Think of RTM and many people will cite the now-famous example of the Oreo tweet that went out during the 2013 Super Bowl XLVII blackout.

When America’s biggest sporting event of the year was halted by a power outage that caused lights to go out for over half an hour, Oreo tweeted this spot-lit picture of a cookie with the caption, “You can still dunk in the dark.” The tweet instantly went viral, with nearly 15,000 retweets and 20,000 likes on Facebook.⁵ Oreo had captured a moment in cultural history and made it their own, to the delight of the millions of people who were sharing that moment on social media.

Though impressive, RTM has the potential to inform every part of a marketing strategy, not just grab headlines with clever comments and creative responses to current events. Too many brands are trying to replicate Oreo’s success; the outpouring of material around the 2013 Academy Awards shows how many companies wanted to piggyback on the event’s large Twitter audience, but most failed to understand what RTM is really about.

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RTM is really not new at all. For as long as marketers have wanted to get the right message to the right person at the right time and place, there has been a need for a strategy capable of supporting this. What is new are the channels we have at our disposal to reach an unprecedented number of people and the data we have at our fingertips for an intelligent approach.

There is clearly a demand for a strategy that provides this intelligent approach. In a 2012 survey sponsored by Aprimo, a marketing automation software company, more than half (54%) of marketing professionals said that engaging their customers was a marketing challenge, and 52% cited the issue of competing for their customers’ attention amid increasing noise.⁶ Real-time marketing is a way for brands to cut through that noise and reach out to customers.

But we have to do it right. At one end of the spectrum are the brands initiating conversations and responding creatively to the Zeitgeist—even informing it. At the other end are the companies who are more reminiscent of the school dork running around after the cool kids, eager to get his two cents in, trying way too hard.

So which one are you?

It can be a fine line to tread, but getting it right can boost sales, bring new customers on board, and fuel peer-to-peer recommendations. The graph on the right by eMarketer, citing data from GolinHarris, shows the impact RTM can have on potential customers.⁷ As you can see, positivity, interest, recommendations, consideration, and trying or buying of the brand were all markedly increased by exposure to real-time marketing.

We know that a marketer’s goal is to get the right message to the right person at the right time and in the right place. But how do they know who is the right person, when is the right time, which is the right place, and what is the right message? That is where real-time listening and insights come in.

The 2013 eMarketer report Meeting the Need for Speed: How Social Analytics Support Real-Time Marketing breaks down the seven types of real-time marketing that exist, which gives an idea of the potential that exists for companies.

What is clear with RTM is that brands can’t afford to ignore it in their marketing strategy. And 2013 appears to be the year that brands will have made the transition to using real-time data in their marketing campaigns. See the graph above from eMarketer, citing data from an Infogroup Targeting Solutions and Yesmail Interactive survey, for an overview of how brands are using real-time data.

So what is different now, and why is RTM suddenly an option for so many brands that may have overlooked it before?

To answer that, we need to look at how the resources available to marketers have changed as social media technology has moved from being an interesting sideline in a company’s communications to being probably the most powerful tool available in the modern marketing tool box.

Back in the 1960s advertising went through a revolution as television became ubiquitous in people’s households. Think of Mad Men: stylish advertising executives telling people exactly what they needed and how a product would deliver the solution.

In the last few years marketing has gone through another revolution: the social revolution. Marketers no longer tell people what it is they want. Instead, they listen to customers’ needs and develop products accordingly.

Successful marketing uses cutting-edge social technology to understand customers and anticipate need as never before. You bought a particular product? Here are two more suggestions based on your personal profile, tailored to your buying habits and network or friends. You are interested in an event? Here is how our brand is leading the conversation around that event. You have a comment, suggestion, or complaint? This is the creative response that will not only answer your query but will also turn you from a detractor to a committed fan, eager to tell your friends about our company.

Real-time marketing is about more than a quick response. It is about creativity and driving dialogue, and about people doing real things and having meaningful conversations in real time. With so much social data at our fingertips, marketing departments can not only respond to the zeitgeist in real time but they can also drive it in a way that was unimaginable until now.

The availability of reliable, timely data has always been key to successful marketing campaigns, and the explosion of social media in the last five years has provided companies with a wealth of data—if they choose to make use of it.

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You can see how RTM is about more than just advertising or smart content creation—it is about a relevant and timely two-way conversation between a brand and its customers. True RTM mentality needs to permeate all of the relevant internal stakeholders and strategies from a company’s creative to its social responses, to traditional media and beyond. This is marketing at its very best.

The Importance of Agile Marketing and Social Data

Two things we can take away from Oreo’s ability to produce clever content around current events are relevance and creativity.

But a good RTM strategy doesn’t have to mean a constant rush to produce content in response to events. That can give a negative, knee-jerk appearance to your marketing. The best strategies mix real-time marketing into a carefully planned media campaign schedule. This means that RTM techniques can be used to tweak a campaign either in response to a changing mood before it is aired or as the campaign progresses by monitoring the public’s reception to it. The audience will very likely never realize this more subtle approach is even happening, but timeliness, speed, and creativity will be just as important.

Real-time marketing content should support the wider marketing strategies of the brand, perhaps continuing a theme that has been prominent in its advertising, or it should encourage conversations around the new product lines or, better yet, the customers’ needs. Departments need to be agile enough to react to situations that call for good, creative content, but they should not neglect their priorities in order to join in every conversation. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of social data out there, but good agile marketing works when departments remain focused on their priorities. Companies shouldn’t let their marketing strategy be swamped by gimmicky reactions to events, but good structuring can enable RTM to align with wider campaigns and to become a habit, or a way of life, in the day-to-day operation of brand marketers.

Marketing departments have had to change the way they operate in order to meet the challenges and opportunities that the availability of social data means for them. Social media command centers, pioneered by companies such as Cisco, Gatorade, and Dell, have become the norm in some larger organizations, and analytics tools have made the work of filtering data more effective. Companies have had to restructure the way decisions are made, and they have streamlined the processes by which content is generated and published.

“We can now do things far more swiftly and efficiently than we could before,” says Grant Hunter, regional creative director for Asia-Pacific at iris Worldwide. “From a creative standpoint we have an arsenal of digital tools that allow us to stay up all night to code and design a microsite or generate amazing video content in a 24- to 48-hour window, or within minutes generate a Photoshop comp and then post it on Facebook.”¹⁰

But in a June 2012 survey conducted by Stanford University, nearly two-thirds of senior executives said they did not use social media information to track the success of their business, and in a September 2012 study, Adobe found that two-thirds of marketers thought social media should be more “rooted in data,” but fewer than 25% actually used social data for their marketing activities.¹¹

To meet the goal of creative, timely, and relevant responses, brands must make use of the data available, and they must design everything from the structure of their marketing departments to the decision-making processes around the concept of agility.

Relevancy Has a Deadline—but Real-Time Marketing Takes Preparation

Images and videos are creative responses to events; they build on the zeitgeist rather than just giving an opinion, as a simple tweet might. They are easily shareable, and they resonate well with audiences, who appreciate original content. An image can also fit in well with corporate branding, being themed with the brand’s color scheme, logos, or mascots. This means that no matter how widely the image is shared, it is still instantly recognizable as belonging to that brand.

Timing is critical to creating responses in real time. For brands that are more used to organizing campaigns around the print ad and TV commercial, planned months in advance, the concept of turning around visuals in days or even hours can be hard to adapt to. But if your brand has a strong sense of the story it wants to tell, there’s no reason why you can’t integrate news items and cultural events that are relevant to your brand and give your brand’s perspective on them through visual media. Not all brands need to turn images around quite as quickly as Oreo; some will have longer to respond depending on their audience and the news item. This fast turnaround means that brands have become more like publishers, thinking and operating in ways that enable them to give their take on relevant events on a rolling basis, as they happen.

It can help to think of these sorts of images as subplots to your main print and TV ads. You don’t have to come up with whole new concepts. Once these have been agreed on, you can have more flexibility to adapt them to what it happening in the world around you in real time.

Without giving too much text explanation, companies can give their take on a whole range of situations with a well-developed image. Below are just some of the examples:

It is important to remember that some of the best off-the-cuff photos and videos take preparation. Responding to a sporting event or to the Academy Awards can be preplanned (you know the day it will happen, and you can have several alternatives lined up ready to go whatever the outcome), but true real-time response requires you to develop the right internal infrastructure as well as a strong muscle memory. RTM is all about internal empowerment and practice.

Many brands have tried to emulate Oreo’s successful Super Bowl tweet, but it was no “happy accident” or lucky event that can be copied by releasing a single image. Oreo had spent months building up its online audience and its RTM memory muscle through the clever use of RTM, such as the 100-day Daily Twist celebration. Oreo’s marketing team had “trained” for the Super Bowl event by refining their real-time creative response process and incorporating it into their day-to-day routine, much as an athlete would train for a big event.

There is a difference between planning and preparation. The Oreo team had prepared for an event such as the Super Bowl blackout (which no one could predict) through months of trial and improvement of their real-time response technique. That was why their “You can still dunk in the dark” image tweet was so successful: behind the glib message were months of hard work and practice for that moment.

The Oreo team’s example is great because it shows how the RTM response process needs to be ingrained in the everyday running of a brand’s marketing. There will be many days when there is no cultural event that particularly resonates with a brand’s audience or with its core message, but when an Internet meme, a topical news story, or a customer comment does occur that resonates particularly well, the brand is poised and ready to respond in an original, well-thought-out, and creative way.

When real-time marketing is done well, it can make for a brand that understands its customers, reflects their needs in product designs, deals sensitively with feedback, and drives the conversation around its expertise. The obvious problems with RTM are that it can be a highly visible method of marketing and the structure has to be in place within an organization to support the information flow into and out of the marketing department.

We know that for successful RTM, agility is everything. Agility doesn’t have to mean that you are able to respond to every event instantly; that could lead to knee-jerk reactions and a fragmented approach to your overall marketing strategy. But organizational structures, particularly for the largest brands, can be large and inflexible, and processes can be slow. Marketing departments are used to planning months ahead, with much research and testing before campaigns get the go-ahead. RTM demands a more flexible approach, often with more autonomy than these departments are used to.

Even if a brand’s products are not suited to on-the-fly promotion or quick responses (for example, many companies in highly regulated industries have heavy involvement from the legal team before anything can be released), RTM can still be used to monitor responses, gauge customer involvement, or provide market research. If you think past the more headline-grabbing examples and you look into how data and analytics can work for you, you may find that there are many ways you can make use of the insights they provide.

Obviously, RTM gone wrong can lead to negative buzz. There have been some notable tweets or Facebook posts in response to events that have been in particularly bad taste. Kenneth Cole famously made a joke at the expense of the violent Cairo uprisings, and the food website Epicurious sent out a tweet that seemed to make light of the Boston bombings. The marketers behind them had jumped on the RTM bandwagon too eagerly. There is a time and a place for promotion, and this wasn’t the time or the place.

Some companies’ unfortunately prescheduled tweets have caused customers’ indignation. News of supermarket giant Tesco’s involvement in the horsemeat scandal had just broken when this tweet came from its account: “It’s sleepy time so we’re off to hit the hay! See you at 8 a.m. for more #TescoTweets.” There was public outrage at what looked like a horse-related pun at a time when the company’s customers were shocked that they may have eaten contaminated meat. Tesco quickly apologized, saying that the “tweet was scheduled before we knew of the current situation.”¹⁷

Real-time marketing is not just about composing messages. It is also about monitoring output as it relates to the public mood. In the examples just cited, a more receptive strategy would have made sure that future tweets were filtered against social and topical information before they went out, which would have prevented an embarrassing situation.

Not all RTM social media fails have been quite so badly judged. Sometimes coming across as unoriginal or tacky can be detrimental to a brand too. If your definition of real-time marketing means solely commenting on current events or riding the wave of a trending topic, then you’re just adding another voice to the noise. The reaction of many people to brands’ output around the 2013 Academy Awards was that they had mostly missed an opportunity for a creative response. You don’t want to be the last on the bandwagon, but as a marketer, you also want to make sure your marketing content is relevant to the situation, that it builds on your overall marketing strategy, and that it is consistent with your brand’s purpose and voice.

The Future: Four-Dimesional Marketing

Real-time marketing is in its infancy. The near-ubiquitous presence of smartphones makes for an extra dimension to RTM: that of geolocation. Imagine if you could add on-the-go geographical information to your RTM stats. You could anticipate how the customers’ needs change as they move through their day—which restaurant to recommend based on their profile; which advertising will resonate with them at this moment in time (there is no point in showing an advert for winter clothing to a New Yorker on vacation in Florida); and where their friends are right now.

But before we can get there, we need to work on the way we structure our marketing departments to support making RTM a mentality, making it central to the way we approach various aspects of marketing. Research, development, strategies, customer service, execution of campaign, and conversing on relevant topics can all be underpinned by real-time marketing strategies. That way we can be agile and face the future with the right knowledge and tools at our fingertips.

Real-time marketing can help tell a brand’s visual story if we are trained to tell that story as part of our everyday marketing strategy. We need to be clear on which events are relevant to our brand and our customers. Then we can create visuals that show our brand’s perspective on those events, in effect to use them as props in our story. This brings our brand’s story to life and gives it an everyday relevance.