Why brave, playful brands win in real-time marketing

Real-time marketing is where journalism meets marketing and creativity, with the help of some very sophisticated technology and data insight. It’s risky but the risk of not doing it is far bigger than getting it wrong, said Chris Averill CEO of We are Experience, as he rounded off an afternoon of insights and tales of brand real-time adventures at the DMA’s Real-time marketing: the new battleground for brands event on 4 September 2014.

My favourite had to be Tide’s response to The Onion’s spoof article about the detergent brand’s “Look at us, we’re so cool activity on social”.

Anne-Marie Kline, founder of BrandLive, DigitasLB and the team went on a two-day frenzy to write, film, produce and post the spoof Tide advert described in the article. Rock star – check, cute talking animals – check, and all done and posted within two days of The Onion’s article. (Apparently Anne-Marie is one of the cute talking animals and the total cost was US$25,000.)

The video showed that Tide could laugh at itself and went viral almost immediately. It also got picked up by the trade press. Real time makes brands aware of the world around them, with technology that combines social listening, trend analysis and a global newsroom.

But real time is not purely opportunistic, a chance for brands to jump on to the latest craze or news story, it’s carefully planned based on what resonates with people in everyday conversations.

The #icebucketchallenge came up throughout the day. Anne-Marie asked if we remember where we were when we first saw it come up on our feed. And by feed, she means our mobile feed, where content lives by the touch and dies by the swipe. The challenge for brands is to create content that touches us so we don’t swipe it away.

Why did we touch and not swipe the #icebucketchallenge? For one, it felt and looked small and grassroots. No one tried to control it, and people could add their personal story to it.

The #icebucketchallenge does three key things that make people want to share and take part in it say author of Newsjacking, Jon Burkhart, founder of Real-time Content Labs. It offers you pleasure, problem and a purpose.

With that he gave us a peek into the future of real time, where location-based technology will create experiences that will blow our minds.

One from 2012 features Guatemalan shoe store Meat Pack which used location-based mobile technology to steal customers from other brands. An add-on to its loyalty app ‘Hijack’ rewarded customers with a countdown discount. It started at 99%, went down by 1% for every second that passed and stopped when the person entered the Meat Pack store.

Could this be what we’ll be seeing in our local shopping centre in the near future?