Are “War Rooms” The Key To Real-Time Marketing?
Advertising costs during the Super Bowl are at an all-time high; with a 30 second spot setting companies back an average north of $4 million dollars. To justify these huge expenses marketers are looking to find new ways to interact and create conversation with their target market on the advertising industry’s most expensive day. Watching sports has become a multi-screen experience where companies have to do more than just run traditional adverts in order to gain the attention of viewers. They must keep busy on Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels to stay relevant. This has lead to the emergence of ”real-time marketing”, simply defined as the practice of brands engaging their audience via content that is relevant to a current event or cultural happening.
At major events, such as the Super Bowl, companies are now setting up brand “war rooms” where they are able to organise their marketing efforts in quick reaction to ongoing events. These “war rooms” are setups where multiple employees monitor social media feeds and experts at all levels of the creative process are available to create and approve content at speed. Here, social media monitoring tools are utilised to guide real-time content strategies based on incidents, trends, audience engagement and reactions.
Implementing a war room or real-time marketing system can yield great benefits to a marketer, and because of this 53% of marketers say they plan to make greater use of said systems in their future campaigns. Regardless of product or sector, marketers who engage in real-time marketing can expect a 21% increase in positive brand perception and an 18% increase in chance of buying.
Arguably the most successful war room campaign came from biscuit giant ‘Oreo’ during the 2013 Super Bowl. During the game’s third quarter a power outage occurred leaving the majority of the stadium in darkness and play suspended. Millions of fans took to social media pages to fill this time and within minutes the Oreo war room team had reacted with an advert on their Twitter page. It read, “Power out? No problem” with a poorly lit image of an Oreo biscuit and the caption “You can still dunk in the dark”.
Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC
— OREO Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013
The tweet was retweeted just under 15,000 times and increased the companies following by 8,000. The advert was also posted to Facebook gaining 19,000 likes and 6,500 shares helping boost their connected Instagram account from 2,000 to 36,000 followers. According to 360i, the digital marketing company behind it all, the campaign earned 525,000,000 impressions all for a cost $4 million dollars less than a traditional Super Bowl advert. Allowing them to brag that they were the ones who really won the Super Bowl!
Although most real-time marketing efforts don’t even come close to this level of success, we expect brands to see the potential in this practice and increase marketing spend to improve their responsiveness accordingly. What opportunities do you have to capitalise from real-time marketing? Why not get in touch to find out.
