Journal

Posted by: David Logan

28 January 2010

Fish where the fish are! Brands favour Social over traditional Campaign Sites

Coca-Cola and Unilever have just announced that they are shifting their digital focus away from traditional campaign sites and towards community platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, as social media begins to dictate their marketing activity in 2010.

Coca-Cola will position its official Facebook and YouTube pages as the lead online channels for upcoming international activity for its Coke Zero and Fanta brands.

“We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform” said Prinz Pinakatt the Coca-Cola Company interactive marketing manager.

Unilever is also abandoning campaign sites in favor of long-term community engagement platforms.

The shift has caused some digital media specialists to question the long-term future of campaign sites. This may be influenced to some degree by the recent success of Ford who used social media platforms with amazing results.

Ford needed a campaign in the USA to get back into the small car market. They promised the most visible, formative social media experiment. And they delivered. Brilliantly.

They gave 100 consumers a car for six months and asked them to complete a different mission each month. People used the cars to deliver meals on wheels, to take them to wrestle alligators and even to elope. All the tales were documented on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.

It was a gamble but it paid off. Ford wanted to get into the small car market, and it hadn’t sold a subcompact car in the United States since it discontinued the Aspire in 1997. From the campaign Fiesta got 6.5 million YouTube views and 50,000 requests for information about the car - virtually none from people who already had a Ford in the garage. Ford sold 10,000 units in the first six days of sales. The results came at a relatively small cost. The Fiesta Movement is reputed to have cost a small fraction of the typical national TV campaign.

Due to the success of their social media campaign, Ford are now introducing in-vehicle apps for Twitter, Pandora, and Stitcher. Pandora told Ford that 55 percent of its users listen to its mobile app in their cars, while 40 percent of Stitcher users did the same. As a result, the companies, as well as Open Beak for Twitter, used the Ford SDK to develop Sync-enabled apps that can be accessed from the 8-inch LCD screen. The apps can start via voice commands; for example, a driver can tell Pandora what song he or she wants to hear, tell Stitcher what news content to read, and get Open Beak to read the Twitter feed to you as you drive.

Post a Comment

required

required but will not be displayed

required

radioskylab

What we're listening to in the studio.

Home

LCD Soundsystem

View more at our Last FM page

Teamskylab

The latest feeds from the studio powered by Yahoo Pipes.