Digital Media News

Frozen food brand Birds Eye recently celebrated the launch of its new ‘Inspirations’ range of meals by delving into the world of experiential marketing. As part of a social commerce experiment to measure the returns of Instagram, the Iglo Group owned business opened up a pop-up restaurant with a difference. In a world-first, customers were invited to settle their bill by taking photos of their meals and uploading them to Instagram, tagging #BirdsEyeInspirations.

Birds Eye introduced the ‘pay-by-picture’ campaign after consumer research revealed that 52% of Britons regularly take photos of their meals, with one in ten of us taking at least one snap of our food every week. This is backed up by the fact that there are currently 90 million photos of food on Instagram with a #food hashtag. Yes, that was 90 million.

Ever heard of Cause Related Marketing (CRM)? It’s a is bit of a trendy name, but how much do you know about it? The short and sweet version is that CRM refers to the formation of a commercial partnership between a company and a charity in order to market an image, product or service, for mutual benefit.

Background

The term was first used by American Express in 1983, as they launched a $6 million advertising campaign to raise funds for a Statue of Liberty restoration project.

The company contributed a penny from each charge on American Express cards, a penny from each purchase of traveler's checks, $1 from each new card issued and $1 from every holiday sold at an American Express store, (worth $500 or more).

Unconventional, whacky marketing tactics like guerrilla advertising can have a massive impact. Guerrilla advertising is much like guerrilla warfare: placing ambushes, sabotages, raids and elements of surprise within the marketing industry. Despite it often being a low-cost tactic that delivers maximum results, it can be a risky business when the reputation if your brand is on the line. Guerrilla marketing undoubtedly provokes very strong opinions and emotional responses.

Experiential marketing works because it connects customers to brands through live, face-to-face experiences. This strategy carries an inherent risk: if your campaign isn’t engaging and compelling, the result is probably worse than that of a poor flyer, email, or TV ad. With the latter, more traditional marketing methods, users already have an element of disconnection - they can turn away, click a mouse or change their TV channel. But with experiential marketing your target audience is slap bang in the middle of your campaign. For that reason, it’s vital to know what you’re dealing with and how to do it well. 

When experiential marketing campaigns succeed, they usually do so in explosive, incredible ways. It’s useful to highlight a couple of brilliant experiential marketing campaigns to take note of the creativity.

Comic books are cool. Everyone remembers reading them as a kid. Many of us still read them. Almost of all of us still love them. When it comes to storytelling, it’s hard to beat the success of the comic book. The history of the comic goes way back - scholars can trace its origins to as far back as the Lascaux cave paintings (over 1700 years ago).

And it’s fair to say that the comic book scene is extremely vibrant today. Despite technology and our ability to read content on smartphones, laptops and tablets, comic books are a visual medium that expresses ideas in a popular way. And it’s this storytelling prowess that marketers today can learn from when they plan their campaigns).

Although brands are increasing their spend on social media advertising, only a relatively small portion of it is going to ads - according to a new survey of Ad Age readers.  

Ad Age and RBC Capital Markets jointly conducted their fifth major survey of marketer attitudes toward social media and the survey polled 1,682 executives at marketing, agency and media companies for their opinions on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (which was included for the first time).

It seems that marketing teams are spending slightly more in digital and social media channels than in previous years, but this spend is still a relatively small part of overall advertising budgets. So what’s the thinking behind it?

As Facebook’s lead ad planner, Kelly Maclean’s job is to watch people watch advertisements. In emerging markets, the heat is on to study local activity so that Facebook can come up with advertising methods that perform well in developing countries. She travels to places like Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa to get an inside look at what works and what doesn’t.

So what’s the main difference between Facebook advertising in places like this and countries in Europe and the US? In the US it’s fair to say that social media advertising is rife, to the point where it can sometimes get in the way of ‘socializing’, or it becomes a bit of an intrusion on your digital world. It’s a cluttered marketplace where brands battle for their piece of the action, but it’s a very different story in the developing World where it’s still a novelty to see and hear what big brands have to say. MacLean said: