Interactive Seven 2009 Supplement - Marketing Week

MWIB_260209_p025 19/2/09 17:30 Page 25
INTERACTIVE WEB 2.0
Marketer’s Viewpoint
Unilever UK head of new media and marketing
services Rachel Bristow
There is a big learning curve for brands looking to
work with the likes of Bebo, Facebook and
MySpace, and finding out about the best ways of
communicating on a social network. Unless you
can find ways of engaging people, I don’t think it
can work.
What is attractive about social networks is that
they all have large audiences. We go to where those
audiences are and run competitions and other promotions
that they find engaging.
For some of our brands, social networks really
are relevant. It is a great way to reach 16- to 34-
year-olds. For example, for Lynx we created a brand
platform around the mating game. If we were to go into
a social network and have a static brand page, that
would fall flat on its face. You need to be interactive and
entertaining. It is a mistake to go in and act like it is a
TV ad and say “here’s the message” and that’s it.
You need to update content, share videos and be
really interactive.
For a brand like Flora, I wouldn’t choose a social
network. It has serious messages, so we’d be
better off finding groups concerned with heart
health.
Social networks tend to attract the younger
consumer, and one of the challenges is how to
make social media attractive to the older audience.
Some older people embrace social networking
sites, but most prefer the telephone.
It is quite difficult to get a real view of how
much brands spend online, but it will be lower
than other forms of media. It is set to continue to
increase as online audiences grow. Proving accurately
that marketing on social media is a sales
driver when you are doing other media at the same
time is a challenge with data protection. Tesco and
Sainsbury’s, for example, can’t share data with us
because consumers have not signed up to give transactional
data, so you can’t see exactly who bought
what. Yes, we can see a sales uplift, but we can’t see
who has bought that and whether they have been
exposed to the social network site.
Bun fight: Burger King offered a
free Whopper to Facebook users
who ‘sacrificed’ ten online friends
istered users worldwide and 7.3 million in the UK, is introducing two new
ad services. One is “hyper-targeting”, where major advertisers can target
ads at profile pages based on an in-depth analysis of the content of the page
and thus the site member’s interests. The other, called MySpaceMyAds,
allows SMEs to bid for key words to advertise on profile pages.
A significant opportunity for brands lies in creating applications that
can sit on users’ profile pages. Burger King in the US has a history of
using such techniques. Its latest wheeze is a Facebook application called
Whopper Sacrifice, where users are offered a free burger if they install
a tool on their Facebook page which enables them to “sacrifice” or purge
ten of their online friends. The campaign has led to 200,000 US Facebook
friends being given the elbow and 20,000 free burgers handed out. It has
proved so popular, it has been cancelled by Facebook for breaking the
site’s rules on updates.
An alternative to this is for brands to create their own profile
pages and sign up “friends” or create their own blogs and Twitter feeds.
Notable examples of successful brand pages include Topshop’s MySpace
page and BlackBerry’s fan page on Facebook. This offers a downloadable
application allowing users to
update their Facebook pages from
their phone.
Another route to socialising with
consumers on the web is for brands
to create their own social media sites
from scratch. Brands such as skincare
range Simple and British Airways
have created social forums to
glean insights into consumer behaviour.
This leads into the area of
“crowd sourcing”, a form of collective
problem-solving used by Dell
and Google to enhance and develop
products.
“If the issue of intellectual property
ownership can be solved, open
source innovation is a great way to
future-proof your brand,” says Ann
Longley, interactive strategy director
at MEC Interactive.
Brands are also building interactivity into their own sites or creating
communities to tie in with campaigns. One such initiative was created
for classic oven brand Aga by digital agency Harvest Digital.
The agency recommended a Google mash-up (a web application providing
data from more than one source) where Aga owners could upload
their photos, stories and details to a site. The agency built a website called
thisismyaga.co.uk where owners were encouraged to upload their contact
data to receive recipes, invitations to demonstrations and a chance
to win Aga Cookshop products.
The site is part of the brand’s LoveAga marketing campaign and has
created a community of Aga fans. It has provided user information to
the company to feed into campaigns.
Online Aga saga
“Brand promotion only works with social media where you have a good
story,” says Harvest Digital planning director Mike Teasdale. “For Aga,
we could have just built a microsite and clicked away, but the Aga site
seems to have acquired a momentum of its own.”
He points to other work the agency has done for National Geographic
which involved putting up videos on the Daily Motion online channel.
“We uploaded different videos and got 27,0000 views of the content. It’s
not massive, but it doesn’t actually cost anything,” says Teasdale.
Despite Facebook’s attempts to reap advertising rewards from its service,
it is still a long way off making healthy margins according to observers.
Some estimates say the privately-run company’s turnover hit about $150m
(£108m) in 2007, more than doubling to about $300m-$350m (£216m-£252m)
last year. This is for a service that claims it has 150 million active users.
There have been rumours recently that Facebook is looking to acquire
Twitter, the micro-blogging social network where users type in messages
of 140 characters. These “tweets” are broadcast to anyone who opts to
follow them.
But, like much in the world of social media, the site has yet to find a
way of making money from advertising and there are few signs yet that
it will ever achieve this goal. But this will not stop marketers taking
an optimistic view of their ability to build brands in social spaces. It
may not be quite as efficient as the traditional advertising model, but it’s
much more fun.
Marketing Week Interactive 25