It's All About Beers! - Digital Campaign Case Studies

Today, many beer brands are very active online and take a serious focus on digital marketing. They try to use different tactics and tap on various touch-points to capture wider attention and brand new experiment from the target audience. It could be vary from impressive 3D projection mapping, highly interactive YouTube takeover, socially driven campaign with gamification or purely social promotion for both online and offline activities. Here are some recent highlighted campaigns from Carslberg, Desperados, Polar Beer and Guiness.

1. Carlsberg global digital campaign 

• Agency: Skive
• Big Idea: All echoing the new tagline, ‘That Calls for a Carlsberg’, its new brand positioning.
• How it works: It’s Carlsberg’s first global digital initiative and features content for YouTube and Facebook.Carlsberg has kicked off their new campaign in UK with a couple of pretty big 3D projection mappings on the iconic White Cliffs of Dover and the famous Liverpool Street Station. On their YouTube channel the TV ads and other video clips produced for the launch are available, along with the YouTube Takeover experience. On Facebook Carslberg have gone for something different with an app that invites users to type in a transmission, upload a photo – and send a message to your mates from the moon using text-to-voice and face mapping. 
• Take-aways: The digital campaign will support the new television advertising, ensuring that it reaches audiences who spend their time online.

2. Desperados Beer YouTube Takeover 

• Agency: Dufresne Corrigan Scarlett and MediaMonks 
• Big Idea: Create a pretty cool and ambitious YouTube takeover by integrating the Facebook Connect functionality as part of the experience. 
• How it works: The YouTube campaign for beer brand Desperados is different to most by letting you interact with the story as it unfolds instead of the 99% that just break up the YouTube interface in various ways. Additionally, the Facebook Connect functionality is a neat way of socalising the whole experience, with the takeover bringing your FB friends into the party by pulling in photos on the fly.

3. Polar Beer scores a socially driven campaign 

• Agency: Almap BBDO 
• Big Idea: Tapping into peoples unyielding fanatacism to their favourite football team and the general win-at-all costs attitude of sports fans
• How it works: They created a groundswell of engagement, facilitated by Polar Beer, that engaged tens of thousands of passionate fans from two opposing football team fan bases and endeared them BOTH to the brand for significant periods time (avg ion site was 11mins plus). A true WIN-WIN that managed to align the brand to two opposing audiences and deliver a positive branded experience to both.
• Take-aways: The campaign shows how a powerful call to action based on a real passion point (in this case Football – a religion in Brazil) can motivate online action, participation and engagement.

4. Guiness rises to the top in Singapore

• Agency: BBDO Proximity Singapore 
• Objective: The campaign was developed for the Singapore market where engaging and attracting young consumers to Guinness is a major focus in order to drive a groundswell of engagement on Facebook within 8 weeks.
• How it works: Using a simple but compelling promotional idea to give Guinness’ Facebook fanbase a major boost with its Rise to the Top Social media campaign. The highly partcipatory campaign had a strong viral element and was activated online, and offline. Offline activation was enabled via an innovative iPad app that the agency created allowing brand ambassadors to engage and enrol consumers in bars and in trade outlets.
• Result:The campaign caused explosive growth in fans on Facebook page, achieving 21,000 in only a few weeks, making it the #1 beer and spirits brand fanpage in Singapore. This socially activated short term campaign is the first step of Guinness’ social media engagement strategy in Singapore with even more innovative and engaging content and promotions in 2011 and beyond.

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"Yellow Tree House" & "Mini Gateway" - Digital Campaign Case Studies

How can your digital campaign stand out of the crowd? Thanks to the Internet and its growing role in our lives, agencies have come a long way in the past decade, and they’ve begun to hone in on and innovate in the realm of digital marketing. There are more evidences of the growing appetite of  brands to really get behind innovative digital ideas to get more interaction with the target audience. Therefore, from now on, I would like to share about the case studies of innovative digital campaigns around the world that I've known recently for an overview of the scene.

1. Award-winning “Yellow Treehouse” Campaign 

• Brand: Yellow Pages Group (New Zealand)
• Agency: AIM Proximity and Colenso BBDO (NZ) for true integrated work
• Big idea: Using Yellow Pages book and website can help you achieve any task, no matter how big or small.  
• How it works: The Yellow Treehouse program is all about putting Yellow to the test. Tracey, like everyone, has a mission, hers is to build a restaurant in a tree. The test is that she can only use the Yellow Pages, yellow.co.nz and Yellow Mobile to do it. She’ll need to find architects, builders, restaurant suppliers – everything using just Yellow. Even though it’s a brand campaign you can only take the planning so far – what happens from one day to the next can change very quickly.
• Results: The power of the insight and idea lived well beyond one campaign, and successfully led to the second generation of the campaign – “The Taste of Yellow Chocolate” , which achieved the same heights of success for Yellow in terms of business results, and the chocolate bar created went on to outsell every other chocolate bar in NZ in its first week of launch.
• Takeaways: The campaign leveraged a multitude of touchpoints to deliver spectacular business results for Yellow and it also demonstrated exactly how digital can be seamlessly integrated into a campaign, rather than being an afterthought (as we still see so often today).

2. Mini Gateway Stockholm Campaign 

• Brand: MINI Countryman (Sweden)
• Agency: Jung von Matt Stockholm
• Big idea: From the “Gateway” global concept and the specific challenge in Sweden was to create MINI evangelists, the idea behind is to create the world’s biggest reality game on iPhone – transforming Stockholm city into a living game board.




• How it works: You used an app where you could see the location of the virtual MINI within the Stockholm city border. All locations were updated in real time so you could easily follow how everyone moved.
If you got closer than 50 metres of the virtual MINI you could take the virtual MINI with your iPhone.
Then you had to get away, because anyone within 50 metres could take the MINI from you. The person in possession of the virtual MINI at the end of the 7-day campaign gets the car.  
• Results: The buzz started spreading within minutes after the app was put up on Appstore. Hundreds of thousands discussed it in social media. People from everywhere followed the game on the website.
The campaign created astonishing interaction with the MINI brand. During  the game week  11413 people participated and transported the virtual MINI nearly 1 500 physical kilometers. Average gaming time was 5 hours and 6 minutes per person. 
• Takeaways: Mini has successfully ultilize digital and technology platforms to create a fun, relevant and engaging experience, rather than just being there for some buzz.

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Colgate Wisp’s “Kissovation” Viral Campaign

Colgate Palmolive is quite a big name in marketing. Its recent launch of Colgate Wisp, a mini disposable toothbrush, has been a successful case of actracting audiences across social networks and video sharing sites to deliver millions of engagements in just a few short months.

Mission and Challenge

Targeting 18 to 25-year-old men and women, Colgate Wisp’s mission is finding a way to talk to and engage young and urban people about a brand new product category. These comsumers are known as active daters who care about their initial appearance to the opposite sex or among a group of other people. It believes that the convenience of Colgate Wisp can meet this group’s need and demand. So the challenge is how to introduce the product and transfer its message to these young people in an interesting and engaging way or into relevant conversations and contexts.

Strategies and Solutions

Positioning Colgate Wisp as a kind of technology advancement, the Colgate’s social media agency, Big Fuel, came up with the “Be More Kissable” creative platform, featuring the tangential theme of self-confidence. The “Kissovation” concept signifies the correlation of feeling kissable and strong emotional confidence.

Social media, popular channels of the product’s target consumers, were chosen to deliver the concept. The campaign featured a unique viral video outreach program as the heart of the strategy, along with a photo contest with and a Facebook application.

Online Video Sharing

Partnering with famous YouTube stars, such as KipKay, CollegeHumor, Michelle Phan, YourTango, etc.; a series of eight wacky viral videos, contextually integrating the Wisp, was released and syndicated through YouTube, Vimeo and other hubs. Topics covered a vast range of niche interests such as comedy, dating, relationships, and kooky how-to instructional. These videos were expected to introduce the Wisp to its target consumer in a friendly and entertaining way, without heavy advertising. 

Some of the videos in this series include:

• “Twitter in Real Life ” by CollegeHumor 
• “New Year’s Eve” CollegeHumor 
• “Quick-Draw Gadget” by KipKay
• “Kissable Lips DIY” Michelle Phan 

“Be the Face of Wisp” Photo Contest and Widget

Colgate ran a wildly popular photo contest to find the most kissable person in America, called “The Face of Wisp”. Participants submitted their photo to Colgate Wisp’s website and received a photo sharing widget that enabled friends to vote for them. This widget could be shared on leading social network sites, e.g. Facebook, Myspace, and other microsites. The contest was even spread through relationship magazines such as Elle and Cosmopolitan. And the winner will be in future advertising campaign for Wisp. 

“Spin The Wisp” Facebook Application

To enhance the engagement, a social media appliccations on Facebook, called “Spin The Wisp”, was created to collect Facebook friends’s name and then land on various flavors and locations. So Facebook users can send virtual kisses to random friends or selected ones. 

Results

Until the end of June, the series of “Be More Kissable” videos attracted more than four million views on YouTube and totally more on other video-sharing sites. The click-through rate for the “Spin The Wisp” Facebook app, according to eMarketer, was ten percent based on the number of engagements via notifications, which is quite solid. Until May 2010, the campaigns received more than six million toal engagement based on widget installs, video views, app plays and pass-alongs (eMarketer). At the bottom line, the Wisp generated an “impressive” $44 million in sales after only seven months in the marketplace.

For a summary of The Wisp viral campaign, enjoy the campaign recapture from Big Fuel, the agency behind!

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IKEA's Brilliant "Tagging" Campaign on Facebook

One of the most clever digital campaign last year should belong to IKEA. They set up a profile for the store manager and launched a simple message: "Tag yourself on the furniture that you want to win (in each image). Then write a statement about why you should win in the comment field below the photo. Then hope you were the first to tag that item and had the best justification. Winners will be contacted directly through Facebook. Good luck!" 

Some of the best campaign strategies are simple, and none simpler than using the default “tagging” tool on Facebook to help create a buzz for an online competition. With the way tagging works on Facebook, the moment you tagged anything, everyone in your network instantly knew what was up for grabs. Subsequently, thousands and thousands of people were flooding the Facebook page in search of freebies. A very clever approach for small budget campaigns. 

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The Handshake of Social Media and World Cup 2010

As the world’s biggest sport event is coming in the next three days, its heat is spreading further and hotter than ever before. The world is going to stop for a month to watch out the game.

Sport connects people. And so do social media. With more than 40 million active Facebook users, 50 million daily tweets and millions of views on Youtube everyday, social media have been becoming more popular since the previous game in 2006. So this will be the first World Cup experiencing the explosive growth of social marketing. There’s buzz about the role the social media will play in the action off the field. The only question: What have you seen, here and there?

FIFA developed its own service

FIFA has plans to get in on the action with its own social networking service called TheClub on its official website. There are more than 1.6 million members attended so far, who connect to other fans around the world.

Social networking sites are ready

The marketing strategies of World Cup 2010 include the use of Facebook sites to connect fans on global and regional levels and Twitter accounts to provide updates on the preliminary news and action. It’s expected to drive a record amount of social media traffic as users descend on Twitter and Facebook to critique refereeing decisions, celebrate goals or simply taunt the opposition.

• Facebook has an app that ranks soccer passion based on number of “Likes” fans hit for their team, divided by the number of Internet users in that country. Moreover, football fans have already participated in Facebok fanpages and groups and got daily updates about this global "social" event in advance of the 32 team competition.
• Twitter has already commented that they expect this year’s World Cup to drive more online traffic than the U.S. presidential election and the Super Bowl. Very much like the Winter Olympics look for Twitter to be a tremendous source for 2010 World Cup breaking in the moment news, insight and reactions.

Brands are getting more social 

FIFA sponsors and partners have also evolved their strategies for building and sustaining online buzz around the tournament. Brands have multiple planned online touch points for the World Cup. They are also directly or indirectly participating in World Cup social media marketing related endeavors.

• Coca-Cola has launched an online contest called the ‘Longest Celebration’ competition , inspired by Roger Milla’s post-goal dance at Italia ’90, which allegedly inspired a new generation of dance moves. The contest simply encourages users around the world to upload their own creative goal celebrations to YouTube.

• Budweiser takes creativity to the next level with the “Bud House”- an online reality show featuring one fan from each of the 32 qualifying countries living in a house in Cape Town with contestants eliminated when their team is knocked out
• McDonalds launched its online World Cup Predictor, in the form of an online fanstasy tournament, asking fans to use their knowledge to predict which teams will win which games, round-by-round
• Sony Ericsson has launched the Twittercup which appears to be an online competition at its very simplest – the more tweets your nation receives, the further they go in the cup. Launched in December 2009, the Twittercup has already amassed 43,000 tweets
• Castrol is launching the ‘Castrol Index’ and Castrol Predictor apps this month – the first a system for rating players (measuring passes, tackles and moves) housed on www.fifa.com to find the team of the tournament, the second using past team and player performance data to calculate which nations have the best chance of success at South Africa 2010

The real question is what kind of impact are these campaigns going to have on helping brands get the online traction their multi-million dollar investment demands?

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Fahion 2.0 – Not Just a Fad!

Today, I will talk about the combination of fashion and social media, my two favourites. Let's start with the recent rising of fashion bloggers, who have ruled front rows in fashion weeks of high-class brands, which is not a surprise anymore. They are young, quirky and stylist, from a 13-year-old girl, Tavi Gevinson to the shoe-loving teenager, Jane Alridge and many other twenty-something online writers. With a combined audience of half a million readers and the power to make items sell out instantly with their recommendations, these bloggers were clearly people worthy of fashion’s attentions. So, the questions are: Where is this power actually coming from?And why in fashion and beauty industry?

• Power of Word-of Mouth

There is a fact that the fashion and beauty business has always enjoyed a certain word-of-mouth evangelism. When it comes to the promotion of these kinds of products to enhance people’s appearance, consumers listen and believe more in advice coming from friends or acquaintance that they can trust. Keeping that in mind, the fashion industry has tried different approaches to leverage the power of word-of-mouth product endorsement. 

Levi’s is a good case. This year, they launched a campaign named “Levi’s girl”, targetting the female fan base, to find a voice for their brand on Facebook community, following their successful “Levi’s guy” last year. That person should ideally already have a strong social media presence and be passionate about fashion and style. Videos of finalists will be shared and voted by Facebook community members. This campaign is just great as it helps the brand to engage with existing Facebook fans and attract new fans from contestants’ social networks. What’s more, it will create a huge word-of-mouth for Levi’s on social media.

• Consumer-Created Content

On the first generation of fashion brand websites, marketers have promoted and sold products directly. They did miss the word-of-mouth factor, which has been playing an important role in consumers’ mind for building their own “colour”, image and personality. Consumers want to be fashionable and beautiful in their very own way. Therefore, the absence of this important dimension to personalized selling was soon corrected with consumer-created content. Many brands, such as Nike, Longchamp, etc, allow their consumers to design and personalize the product themselves online through the interactivity of web 2.0. Inspirational online stores and social shopping trends are also blooming.

• Peer Recommendations

Blogs, social networks, discussion boards, and so on are containing consumer’s recommended brands and also their reviews and comments on different products. It opens a new era of peer recommendation on the internet. Many consumers started to take notice of these newfound opportunities, and developed a whole new category of must-visit web destinations. From the traditional “point of purchase” concept, marketers are now familiar with the new concept of “point of recommendation”. 

Nowadays, to catch up with the trend, powerful fashion bloggers have been cooperating with brands to “recommend” their products to readers. They have been attending fashion events frequently and even becoming brand designers. Jane Alridge, author of the fashion blog SeaOfShoes, who was invited to design a new shoe collection for the Urban Outfitters, is one of many examples for this.

To sum up, social media can dramatically increase return on investment and allow brands to generate a global following of loyal customers with relatively low investment. Marketers in fashion and beauty industry seeking to leverage these exciting new trends should pay attention to social media as they represent the best opportunities to take full advantage of the Internet for your brands. 

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Lipton Milk Tea: Chinese Viral Campaign

[Digital Buzz] This is a little old now, but a great view of what can happen when something goes viral in China! Earlier this year, the agency AKQA and Lipton Milk Tea created a viral campaign that was launched on China’s biggest IM and social networking site QQ to celebrate Chinese New Year 2010.

The campaign featured a website where people would select one of three videos (shot in first person) to personalise and send to a friend along with adding a special Chinese New Year greeting that was made of the steam from Lipton Milk Tea. The results were pretty crazy, with over 100 million people sending or watching a view in just a few weeks! Watch the campaign's summary below:

Challenge

Winter is a key season for sales of Lipton Milk Tea. Chinese New Year is also a heavy promotion period for the Lipton brand. The brief was all about communicating warmth during the festive season linking back to the milk tea product, and about allowing users to send Lipton Branded Chinese New Year Greetings to their friends.

Solution:

Lipton's agency created a viral tool that lived on QQ.com. QQ is China’s biggest IM and social platform. This tool was comprised of three short films in where users could simply upload a photo of their face, and instantly be part of any of the three films. They had the option to star in a schoolgirl dance, to perform in a rock band and to mime out greetings. In addition to this content, users could type in a customized Chinese New Year greeting to forward along with the film. When friends received this Lipton branded greeting, they saw a film shot in first person of somebody opening a door and receiving a box. The box contained a steaming hot cup of Milk Tea. When users blew into their built in microphone, the steam would then reveal the customized greeting. They then saw the film with the sender’s head in it.

Results:

This campaign has already received loads of free media exposure and proved that viral marketing, and a strong partner really deliver results. In a country with over a billion people, campaigns that reach the millions are not surprising. Lipton Milk Tea ‘A Cup of Greetings’ engaged over 100 Million users in less than two weeks since it’s launch proving that a simple Chinese New Year greeting, can truly go Viral.

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