Shorty Awards x Real Time Summit 2018
The Real Time Summit took place in Chattanooga, Tennessee and brought together both industry leaders within the social and digital space as well as attendees to discuss real time marketing and storytelling.
On Day 2 of the Real Time Summit, our Real Time Academy members Kelle Rozell (Director of Social Media, VICELAND) and Dominik Heinrich (Vice President Global, Product Innovation & LAB13, MRM//McCann) joined Shorty Awards Marketing and Partnerships Director Rob Schlissel for a panel that looked in-depth at real time marketing, how it has grown, and where it’s headed in the future using examples of stand-out Shorty Award campaigns.
To begin, we asked the panel about their views on what comes to mind when they think about real time marketing.
Q: What is Real Time Marketing?
Kelle: A strategic, very nimble, very dynamic approach to marketing. It’s a reaction, but a more strategic reaction. It’s very thoughtful.
Dom: Strategic and comes from human insight. We’re trying to create seamless experiences and experience will become seamless if it’s contextually relevant. If the ad or engagement of a brand makes sense to my life then it becomes relevant to me and is actually meaningful to me.
Then, we went into examples from past Shorty Award entrants who’ve created campaigns shaped around a real time response. The Best Real Time Response category looks at a brand’s ability to utilize social listening, authentic customer engagement, speed to market, and response to the topics and trends of today:
Campaign: Turning their Tweets Against Them (Bronze Distinction Honoree)
Producers: MullenLowe Boston, Burger King
Campaign Brief: Wendy's has a reputation for being the ultimate Twitter troll. In response to Wendy’s discontinuation of their spicy chicken nuggets, a shadow war was waged against them by Burger King on Twitter as Burger King introduced their own spicy nuggets.
Q: What are your thoughts on the Turning their Tweets Against Them campaign?
Kelle: The fact that people became interested in the actual marketing of a fast food chain is fascinating. Burger King was able to take that risk and be irreverent in a very humorous way—it’s so unexpected for fast food restaurants to capture people’s attention like that.
Dom: They have this bias in themselves that they understand our world is working differently and brands need to engage with each other, in a competition or with a positive effect (e.g. McDonalds and Burger King teaming up for the creation of the McWhopper).
This campaign demonstrates how you can make your competitor’s loyal following work for you. They chose a specific platform (Twitter) where their brand could shine and ultimately where their competitor’s followers had been most active. This, along with incorporating user-generated content into their promotions proved to be key components to their successful campaign. We’ll next look at a stunt campaign that really brought the noise.
Campaign: The Sound of Priceless (Winner)
Partners: McCann New York, MasterCard
Campaign Brief: A player on a rival team of the Cubs had accused Wrigley Field fans of lacking passion, specifically, that they were not loud. In response, McCann and MasterCard built a sound meter app and placed it around the stadium and the city to measure just how loud Wrigley's fans were during the World Series.
Q: What are your thoughts on The Sound of Priceless campaign?
Dom: I love this campaign, it’s impressive how the team came up with it so quickly. MasterCard is known for their “priceless” campaigns, we see it around the world, but this stunt was one of the best.
Kelle: When we think about real time marketing there are things that feel like big ideas and there are things that just feel like easy quick things to do, even though you’re working quickly, you see the opportunity and go for it. This felt like a big idea, they built an app and turned it around so quickly—super strategic and seemed like the perfect opportunity. I also see the potential for extension through a broader social call to action, asking people to submit videos, etc.
This campaign utilizes real time conversation to create something that’s inherently engaging, novel, and integrative within an already existing large community of sports fans. It was an extension of their already popular and recognizable tagline “priceless” and was overall executed in a way that didn’t seem out of place and ultimately hit a home run with their fans. Our final award-winning example looks at a brand partnership involving one of the most talked about apps of 2016, Pokémon GO.
Campaign: PokéMaster | "Catch Em All" (Gold Distinction Honoree)
Partners: M Live: Marriott International's Real-Time Marketing Command Center
Campaign Brief: Just before Nick Johnson became the center of a worldwide conversation as the first gamer to reportedly catch all available Pokémon in the United States, M Live and Marriott Rewards immediately engaged Nick giving him the opportunity fulfill his dream to travel around the globe to locations where exclusive Pokémon existed.
Q: What are your thoughts on the PokéMaster campaign?
Dom: You need a good client who is willing and brave enough do something like that in real time because there is always risk involved. That’s the good part about this campaign is that they jumped on a wave.
Kelle: They saw an opportunity and they found a way to get in on it and make it a big story. The story was about Pokémon. I would love to see what the brand got from it. The win was the larger press story around it.
This campaign took on a massive audience with the Pokémon GO app craze and ultimately was able to generate a big amount of organic impressions with their involvement. They emphasized authentic storytelling and placed their brand as the facilitator that aided in helping drive Nick’s story. Campaigns such as these can translate into positive brand associations and larger global awareness.
To conclude our panel we looked towards the future and what roles real time marketing could play or be adapted into.
Q: What comes to mind when thinking about the next 12 months for real time marketing?
Kelle: I think there are some cool things that people are doing that we could see how this affects real time marketing. For example, Netflix coming back with Black Mirror and taking interactive content to a new level (different experience, people watching at different times). It will be interesting to see how Netflix creates content around each individual’s different experiences with all the storyline possibilities throughout the season.
Dom: The Netflix example is great. At LAB13 we are figuring out what’s happening in the next 12 months. I think a big topic in the next 12-18 months is how can we leverage AI in a meaningful way to create content and make the experience and content more relevant to people. Not only with video content but with advertising tailored to people’s behavior. The most interesting piece for me is outside of marketing and it’s: How can real time engagement between brands and consumers influence our life in a positive way?—there is a lot of potential. I would love to come back and see what we’re talking about next year.
To catch the full version of the live streamed Shorty Awards panel at the Real Time Summit click here (panel starts at 2:40:00).
Worked on a creative campaign this year? We are opening up entries for the 11th Annual Shorty Awards starting October 22, 2018!
