Social Media Campaigns of the Month â January 2016

Tesco launch UK’s first Promoted Moment on Twitter #FeelGoodCookBook

In January we saw Tesco become the first UK brand to launch a campaign using Twitter’s brand new ‘Promoted Moments’. Accessed via the Moments tab, a series of ten gifs created an interactive #FeelGoodCookBook, featuring healthy recipe ideas with a twist. The promoted campaigns were live for 24 hours and were signposted by a promoted badge which featured alongside the trending stories of the day.

By day two, each of the ten gifs had received an average of around 20 likes and 3 retweets, which suggests that they had a moderately low impact. Also, it isn’t obvious as to what the objective of this campaign was as there was no click-through and it didn’t appear to be tied to any other channels. After some further digging, it seems that the aim was to promote their recipe eBook.

The timing of this campaign is also questionable as it was at the end of January; it would have been better to have seen this at the beginning of January as this is the time when most people are making new years resolutions and are choosing to opt for a healthier lifestyle after indulging over the holidays.

Since Tesco’s Promoted Moment, Xbox and Sky are also planning on using the feature to support their own campaigns. Xbox will use it to promote a new game; Quantum Break and Sky are yet to confirm their campaign.

The one to watch… #SmearForSmear

Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust launched #SmearForSmear, a campaign aimed at encouraging women to share a smeared lipstick selfie on social media and to then nominate friends to do the same - all in support of encouraging women to attend their cervical smear appointments, as currently 1 in 5 women do not attend.

The charity ran the same campaign last year, but this year they’ve received celebrity support from the likes of Kara Tointon, Lacey Turner and Erin O’Connor. Cara Delevingne, who has 26.1 million Instagram and 4.68 million Twitter followers, increased the exposure of the campaign by getting involved.

Although originally planned to run during Cervical Cancer Prevention Week (24 - 30 January), with the kind of celebrity endorsement they’ve received, it is expected that this campaign will continue to gain momentum and last longer than initially planned as we saw with the ‘no make-up selfie’ and ‘ice bucket challenge’.

Toyota's 'hyper-targeted' Facebook ads in 100 clips

Toyota USA launched a new Facebook campaign that serves custom video messages to users based on their likes and interests. 100 short video clips, featuring celebrity James Marsden, were created by Saatchi and centred on different hobbies and interests to reach a hyper-targeted experience for their end users. The main objective of the campaign was to promote the Toyota RAV4.

This involved data from Facebook profiles and interchangeable video clips to create the necessary versions to show to each user. Depending on the interests listed in the user’s profile, three different clips combined to make a single video. For example, if a user had ‘liked’ Playstation and FanDuel, you might see, “You’re stylish and tech-savvy, just like the all-new RAV4 Hybrid.”

Dominos Dough to Door

Using SnapChat, Domino’s Door to Door campaign tells the story of a perilous pizza delivery made amidst an alien invasion. Using SnapChat’s Story function, Dominos were able to build a story which played across the platform for just 24 hours - not a lot of time if you happened to miss the beginning of the story!

The short, 2 minute video followed the journey of a delivery driver who encountered (and overcame) a series of obstacles whilst trying to deliver a pizza to a customer. Within each clip, users were shown various letters which eventually spelt out to a discount code, which ties nicely back to a purchase. The code which is redeemable online, was also promoted across their Facebook and Twitter pages.

#EMOJINAL or #EMOJIFAIL?

With the help of agency Bright Spark, House of Fraser attempted to jump on the emoji bandwagon by launching their Twitter campaign, #EMOJINAL. The campaign began when the brand tweeted three emoji’s, including a gun pointing at a house. They then went on to post images with Photoshopped emoji’s, including a very cheeky tweet directed at rapper Kanye West.

House of Fraser then began to direct users to www.emojinal.co.uk where they had to ‘crack emoji codes’ - the names of films spelt out in emoji’s - in order to reveal an exclusive Valentine’s Day offer. Users had to crack 13 codes in order to make it to the offer, which seems like a lot of effort and time for a voucher code.

It’s safe to say that the campaign backfired. House of Fraser received a lot of backlash and some users even thought that House of Fraser had had their Twitter account hacked and some users threatened to unfollow the brand. This campaign is nothing like anything we’ve seen from House of Fraser and doesn’t fit with their customer profile, nor the high profile image that they have worked so hard to achieve.

I became an ALDI lover when I tasted _____ for the first time.

ALDI Australia led a Twitter campaign where they asked their followers to complete a sentence which read, “I became an ALDI lover when I tasted _____ for the first time.” Obviously this led to a huge number of very inappropriate responses including many people simply calling it a social media fail. There was no mercy for the ill-advised campaign with one user commenting: 'The bitter tears of social media gone wrong.’ Well, they did ask for a response. Although it encouraged high engagement on Twitter, this is a fairly cheap tactic in getting your customers to interact with you.

This was discussed at the DMA Social Media Council in February 2016.

https://dma.org.uk/communities/social-media-council