Real-time marketing: Is the juice worth the squeeze?
4C’s Goldman and Mediacom’s Mellow
Some marketers make a real big deal out of real-time marketing – a form of advertising that is anchored to a cultural event – but it has very specific limits for European markets, we learned this week.
At a Mediatel and 4C debate, Mediacom’s head of emerging digital activation EMEA, Renee Mellow, warned marketers to think about the region they’re in before they go real-time – or else they risk losing brand impact.
“Real-time was born out of the Super Bowl and Oreo and in a giant market where it is generally a homogeneous culture,” Mellow said, noting than in the States, most people speak English and the cultural references are very similar – “so you can easily spray and pray in that market and have some impact.”
However, we heard that things are much different in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
“If you’re operating in EMEA, trying to find a cultural event or anything real-time that would resonate to Germans, Spanish, is a massive challenge in itself,” Mellow said.
“You can have some football events, but there isn’t a Super Bowl in that same way.”
In 2013, Oreo capitalised on the Super Bowl power outage with a tweet (pictured) that was retweeted 10,000 times in one hour and 15,000 times in the first 14 hours. By the end of the game, Oreo’s Twitter following had grown by around 8,000, while the brand’s Instagram following increased from 2,000 to 36,000. The post was liked almost 20,000 times on Facebook.
Other brands including Volkswagon and Calvin Klein tried similar social media tricks but without the same levels of viral success.
Mellow cited work Mediacom has done with UEFA across EMEA as an example where a real-time marketing campaign has not produced “drastically different results” for a client – before telling a room full of marketers to ask themselves, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”
Despite Mellow’s comments, Aaron Goldman, chief marketing officer at 4C, a data science and tech company, said it is still worth the effort because so much of the process can be automated, which frees up agencies’ time to deliver cultural cut-through in other ways.
“Thankfully there are tools that can automate large parts of the process and that then puts the imperative back to the agency to focus on the strategy and the creative,” Goldman said.
“You can automate almost everything else in terms of when the ad is delivered, what things are going to trigger an ad, what sequence they should go in, and that part is made a lot easier.”
See also: Social media’s inflection point