seriously social 2015
Transcripción
seriously social 2015
SERIOUSLY SOCIAL 2015 Peter Field SAMPLE VERSION Four things to take from this report A NEW ‘SOCIAL ORDER’ ORIGINALITY IS KEY TO SOCIAL SUCCESS CUSTOMER ACQUISITION IS KEY TO SOCIAL EFFECTIVENESS SOCIAL WORKS BEST WITH A FEW OTHER CHANNELS The rise of ‘paid social’ and the decline of organic reach, particularly on Facebook, are having an impact on strategy. It is becoming harder for lowbudget campaigns to break through, and those that do are using more offline activation. As a result, success in social now requires both ‘sharing power’ and money. The rise of investment in ‘paid social’ may be leading to a focus on shortterm metrics, rather than longterm brand-building. A survey of shortlisted entrants for the Warc Prize for Social Strategy shows that ‘originality’ is overwhelmingly seen as the most important factor in a campaign becoming a social ‘hit’. It is viewed as far more important than utility and incentives. This supports earlier research linking creativity and social effects. The study suggests that, like ‘traditional’ marketing, social strategies are most effective when they take a long-term view and focus on customer acquisition, not retention. Emotional appeals are more likely to deliver long-term success. Social-led campaigns appear to work best when accompanied by three to five other channels. In the shortlisted case studies from the Warc Prize for Social Strategy, these are highvisibility offline media. 1 2 2 Seriously Social 2015 – Sample version 3 4 © Copyright Warc 2015. All rights reserved. Executive summary This report draws lessons from the world’s best social strategy. It is based on expert analysis of the shortlist of the Warc Prize for Social Strategy 2015, a global competition that rewards smart social and ‘earned’ media thinking that leads to business results. The winners of the Prize were announced in June 2015. Each showcases strategic thinking that both drove social effects and had a business impact for the brand. The Seriously Social 2015 report, authored by marketing consultant Peter Field, looks at the 32 shortlisted entries as a single body of work. It considers features of all entries on the shortlist and compares trends to analysis of the 2014 Prize, exploring the drivers of social effectiveness. To do this it uses: • tagging data applied when the case studies were published on Warc.com, including analysis of media channels, budgets and creative approaches; • an in-depth survey with the authors of shortlisted papers; 3 • analysis based on different ‘models’ of social strategy – top-down versus bottom-up, and cause-driven versus brand story-driven. Paid social media The first theme to emerge from the research is the shift to ‘paid social’. Changes in social media algorithms have restricted brands’ ability to achieve exposure without paying for reach. In 2015, the average budget of shortlisted campaigns has increased almost 40% from the average budget in 2014. Not all case studies had large budgets, however, and many had to be very creative to achieve social success without media spend. Broadly, the case studies can be categorised as low-budget campaigns looking for substitutes for money, and higher-budget campaigns that paid for reach. The growing use of paid social media seems to be increasing the need to demonstrate returns from social investment, and an increase in short-term evaluations. This short-term focus has seen a reduced emphasis on using long-term measures Seriously Social 2015 – Sample version of brand equity, and reduced usage of emotions, storytelling and consumer-generated content in the campaigns. These trends point to an emphasis on shortterm sales rather than longerterm brand building. As well as paid social, there were more traditional media used alongside the social channels in 2015, particularly used by the campaigns with larger budgets to improve their reach. Social channels have also evolved since 2014, with online video of increasing importance. While Facebook and Twitter still dominate, YouTube and Instagram showed strong growth. Drivers of social success Two currencies for social success were identified – the innate ‘sharing power’ of the social idea, and the money required to deliver reach, more significant in 2015 because of the constraints on organic reach imposed by some social media players. The survey of shortlisted authors found that the feature thought most important to social success was the originality of the idea, cited by 83% of case study authors. Creativity has become an essential driver of organic social reach as well as facilitating paid reach, as many of the winning cases demonstrate. Other notable drivers were utility, highlighted by 42% of authors, and a worthwhile cause and an experiential element, both cited by 38% of authors. The campaign feature that least drove social success was offers and prizes. While this tactic is often cited by brands as a preferred strategy for social, it does not drive long-term effects and value for the brand. The analysis shows the most powerful use of social strategy is as part of a long-term brand-building effort, and optimum length for a social campaign is more than six months. The report also considers these drivers of social success in relation to the type of social strategy and how the importance of campaign strategies changes depending on the time over which social success is observed. Experiential elements, creativity and usefulness of service are seen as more important features to long-term success than short-term for a campaign. The © Copyright Warc 2015. All rights reserved. Executive summary “The most successful strategy, whether for a high- or low-budget campaign, is to partner social media with traditional offline media.” features more important to shortterm success were association with causes, sports and events, and consumer-generated content. The difference is whether the feature works to strengthen the brand and so lead to long-term effects, or to prompt behaviour and generate more immediate activation. The ideal campaign would comprise both of these strategies. Drivers of commercial effectiveness The report also examines business, activation and brand effects to determine drivers of commercial effectiveness. The first factor examined is timescale. The study shows long-term social campaigns achieve greater sales and market share growth through new customer acquisition. Business effects of brand story and cause-driven campaigns are shown to be similar when considering all budget levels. However, significant differences are seen when looking at low budgets – here the cause-driven campaigns greatly outperformed those with a brand story strategy. In terms of creative strategy, 4 Seriously Social 2015 – Sample version there were some general trends, even though most entries used a range of overlapping strategies. Consumer-generated content results in powerful activation effects but was less successful for long-term business and brandbuilding effects. Partnerships and affiliations produce powerful activation and brand-building effects, but tend to drive less significant long-term business results. Finally emotional social strategies result in powerful effects across metrics, but particularly in business and brand effects. Social in the media mix The 2015 campaigns confirmed the finding from 2014 that social strategy should involve multiple channels. There were no cases among the 2015 shortlist that used fewer than three social media. The average number of other channels used was 6.9, although 41% of campaigns used just three to five other channels aside from social. This is a different pattern to 2014, when the trend was for using more channels alongside social media. This focus on fewer channels seems to enable brands to utilise budget more effectively given the increased cost of achieving reach. There were changes in the other media used compared to last year. Low-budget campaigns that perform well tend to use games, search, point-ofpurchase and product sampling alongside social media. The most successful high-budget campaigns focus on point-ofpurchase as well as newspapers, ambient, cinema, outdoor, PR and television. Television was used by 75% of high-budget campaigns, closely followed by outdoor (63%). These two channels also saw the largest growth as lead media alongside social across the two years of the competition. In conclusion the most successful strategy, whether for a high- or low-budget campaign, is to partner social media with traditional offline media, particularly those that offer high visibility for the budget. The increasing difficulty in achieving reach through social alone means that using social media as the only channel is unlikely to achieve the desired result. © Copyright Warc 2015. All rights reserved. Notes from the chair of judges SHUBU MITRA, Coca-Cola Chairman of judges for the 2015 Warc Prize for Social Strategy Shubu Mitra is Director, Connection Planning Effectiveness and Productivity, Coca-Cola. He leads Coca-Cola’s global effort to improve the effectiveness of brand marketing communications and increase productivity. 5 There are three things that stood out from the entries to the Warc Prize for Social Strategy. The first theme was the importance of social at the heart of a campaign, rather than just use of social tactics. Anybody who reads the examples can see that. The second thing – and this was quite stunning – was the productivity. A lot of these campaigns had very little or no budget, but achieved fantastic results – not just in changing attitudes, but really impacting behaviour. To get that kind of change with the budgets that were available is very impressive. We used to be satisfied with social campaigns affecting consumer attitudes or perceptions about brands and categories. We are now seeing some great examples that go one step further and impact people’s behaviour. The third thing I noticed was that we had quite a few cases that demonstrated very smart use of different social platforms that are available – not just Facebook and Twitter, which are the dominant platforms, but platforms such as Instagram and Reddit. It demonstrates a level Seriously Social 2015 – Sample version “The first theme was the importance of social at the heart rather than just use of social tactics. Anybody who reads through the examples can see that come to life.” of maturity in our understanding of how these platforms relate to users and how different platforms can be leveraged to achieve communication goals. Tips for entrants There are two things that I would like to see more of in future entries to the Prize. The first is a clearer description of the process by which a particular campaign went from business objectives to communication objectives to social strategy objectives to the actual social architecture. Second, I would like to see more information about the strategic options that are laid out at the planning stage. We all understand that social campaigns don’t necessarily go exactly as planned, and any good team would have in their back pocket strategic options for different reactions to the campaign. I would love to see more of that explained in the case studies, because that means that it’s not just about pre-planning and execution. It’s truly about planning and active execution, which I think is core to social campaigns. © Copyright Warc 2015. All rights reserved. Three ways to use social As a judge I was struck by the creative use of social media and the positive impact it had on business results. GIAN FULGONI, comScore Judge for the 2015 Warc Prize for Social Strategy Gian M. Fulgoni is co-founder and chairman emeritus of comScore, Inc. This piece is an extract from ‘How Brands Using Social Media Ignite Marketing and Drive Growth’ by Gian Fulgoni, published in the Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 55, No. 3, 2015. 6 Social as a supplement to media spend There are two types of branded social media communications: ‘organic’ and ‘paid’. Organic social media consists of brand communications that are created by the advertiser on a social platform. The advertiser/ sponsor doesn’t pay for it, and it can lead to ‘earned’ media where the consumer shares the communication with others – either online or via word of mouth. ‘Paid’ content is as it sounds: the advertiser pays for the content. Both of these types of social communications are used as supplements to existing media programs, and this is probably the most common way that social marketing is used today. In part, this reflects the reality that building high reach on social media using organic alone has become increasingly difficult due to algorithmic changes to social newsfeeds that favour paid over organic brand communications. Seriously Social 2015 – Sample version It is interesting that in all the finalist case studies in the 2015 Warc Prize for Social Strategy, brand managers used two diametrically different types of supplemental social strategies: campaigns that supported television and campaigns that were amplified by television. Traditional media spend was used to seed a campaign, often supporting the notion that nothing yet beats television for generating high reach in a very short period of time. Social amplification was implemented to build reach and frequency beyond television alone. A variation on the same strategy involved the use of paid social media to fuel earned and owned social communications. One brand entry put it well: “Start a fire and then rely on our social tribes to fan the flames.” The second supplemental approach turned the first on its head: It called for the use of paid, owned, and earned social media to build awareness of the campaign to a level where ‘earned’ television coverage (i.e., television coverage not paid for by the brand) brought further value to the brand. This worked well for a number of campaigns in the Prize – for example, those that used humour and/ or celebrities and, therefore, were entertaining for television to cover, or those that focused on reducing crime in society and, therefore, worthy of being included in television news coverage. Social as a substitute for media spend In some situations, especially where the brand was struggling financially, social media could substitute for media spend. SPC, an Australian fruit processor, found itself in such a perilous position that it was just months away from closure. The company was able to use influencers, Tweets, direct messages, and Facebook posts quickly to rally sympathetic support from Australians across the country to purchase its products and save a 100-year-old brand. Social as a saviour On a surprising number of occasions, social was the centrepiece of an effort to breathe © Copyright Warc 2015. All rights reserved. Three ways to use social “In an age of globalization, it’s important that marketers think global but act local. And social can be used in a very costeffective manner as a key part of the local marketing approach.” 7 life into a failing—or even dying—brand. In some cases, it was clear that the brand’s prior marketing strategies had failed abysmally. In others, it appeared that the brand essentially had been abandoned by its owners. In such instances, necessity became the mother of invention, and impressive creative tactics involving social were implemented (leaving me to wonder why it took being on the brink of disaster to unleash creative social juices). Perhaps, because social is still unproven at many companies, it took precisely that kind of a situation to persuade senior management to invest in social marketing. Clearly, all else had failed. Also intriguing were the cases that featured global marketing strategies that completely failed to be effective in some individual countries, leaving the brand in a very vulnerable position in those markets. In such instances, social marketing became especially relevant in a brand’s rebuilding efforts because it essentially demanded that brand managers understand the nuances of a particular local market and Seriously Social 2015 – Sample version tailor their communications appropriately. In an age of globalization, it’s important that marketers think global but act local. And social can be used in a very costeffective manner as a key part of the local marketing approach. In some cases, the brand was believed to lack an affinity with Millennials, and social was a key tactic to use to re-engage that target audience with the brand. With disaster at hand, some of the marketers among the Prize finalists came up with imaginatively creative ways in which to establish the relevance of the brand among this important demo segment. ‘Social as a saviour’ is a particularly apt descriptor of how some not-for-profit organizations have been able to use social marketing to achieve their goals. Summary If ever I had any doubt, the 2015 Warc Prize for Social Strategy case studies demonstrated that social media has become central to the marketing efforts of many brands and organizations. And, in turn, the palette of tools that a marketer can use has been enhanced dramatically by social. It’s especially impressive to see the creative applications of social and how it can be used to amplify the impact of traditional media. I would venture to say that social can bring marketing creativity to life, especially even in those instances where media budgets are limited or nonexistent. The only current shortcoming I see is that the specific isolation on business results of the impact of social—especially organic efforts—needs further development. Because social generates so many intervening metrics, it’s easy to rely on them as evidence of success. It’s clear, however, that some of the metrics being used to evaluate organic social marketing are overstated. In the case of paid social media, more and more tools are becoming available to allow marketers to understand its impact. This is important because recent changes in the ranking algorithms of some social platforms have had the effect of favouring paid versus organic communications in terms of reach and frequency. © Copyright Warc 2015. All rights reserved. Warc Prize case study: US Navy GRAND PRIX PROJECT ARCHITEUTHIS (AMERICA’S NAVY) Advertiser: US Department of Defense Lead Agency: Campbell Ewald Market: United States This case study describes how the US Navy recruited cryptologists via an alternatereality puzzle-solving game on social media. The US Navy needed to maintain its goal for recruiting cryptologists with a decreased budget, negative press coverage and more challenging market circumstances as unemployment decreased. Exploration of the extremely small and elusive cryptologist target audience revealed an intriguing insight - that the brightest cryptology minds cannot resist a nearly impossible puzzle. This led to ‘Project Architeuthis’, an alternate-reality game where characters, cryptologic clues, tips and updates were revealed via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr. With no paid media, this game was an incredible engagement success, and analysis showed that participation increased the likelihood of enlistment. Read the full case study 8 Seriously Social 2015 – Sample version © Copyright Warc 2015. All rights reserved. Warc Prize case study: Coca-Cola GOLD SHARE A COKE US (COCA-COLA) Advertiser: Coca-Cola North America Group Lead Agency: Starcom Mediavest Group Market: United States This case study explains how Coca-Cola, the beverage brand, adapted its globally successful ‘Share a Coke’ campaign for the US market to encourage teens to drink more Coke. 10 million US teens had not consumed Coca-Cola in the past year, so the company wanted to make a more personal connection with them and encourage them to buy more. It imported the globally successful ‘Share a Coke’ campaign, including putting people’s names on bottles and promoting a social media hashtag to encourage people to get sharing. As a result, 1.25 million more teens tried a Coke over the course of a summer and sales of participating packages rose a 11% - making the US campaign more successful than any other market. Read the full case study 9 Seriously Social 2015 – Sample version © Copyright Warc 2015. All rights reserved. About Warc’s Seriously Social 2015 report Seriously Social 2015 is an exclusive analysis of the world’s most effective social media campaigns by the pre-eminent marketing consultant, Peter Field. Highlights of the report include: • An in-depth review of how social strategy drives broader effectiveness; • Summaries of all the winning cases from the 2015 Warc Prize for Social Strategy; • Practical suggestions on what kind of strategy is most likely to work; 2. Drivers of social success VARIATION BY BUDGET As before, the key drivers are similarly important to lowbudget social campaigns as to high-budget ones: creativity, useful product or service and worthwhile causes, occupy leading positions across both ends of the budget spectrum. Useful product or service rises slightly in importance for lowbudget campaigns because utility provides a low-cost way of adding social value. Again, lower down the pecking order, differences in importance emerge more strongly (Figure 5). Experiential elements and competitions become more important to social success with low-budget campaigns. By contrast, celebrity involvement is considerably more important to high-budget campaigns for obvious reasons. At first sight, one surprising finding is that greater importance was attached to associations with events, sports, shows and games for low-budget campaigns than high-budget ones. These kinds of associations are often expensive to buy, but case studies 21 such as Maker’s Mark show the power of unofficial (i.e. unpaid) take-overs of famous events. At a higher budget level Newcastle Brown also demonstrates this phenomenon. These are the kinds of tactics that help highly inventive lowbudget campaigns fight back against the growing challenge of achieving organic reach. “Utility provides a lowcost way of adding social value.” There may be fewer of them compared to 2014, but those that remain achieve similar levels of success across the range of business, activation and brand metrics. This is examined in more depth in the next chapter, which looks at the drivers of success in terms of these metrics. Figure 5. Key variations in the importance of features by budget % cases finding features very important 40 40% 35 33% 30 33% 33% 27% 25 20% 20 15 11% 10 5 0 0% Experiential Low-budget Competition Event, sport, show, game Celebrity High-budget Seriously Social 2015 © Copyright Warc 2015. All rights reserved. • Comparisons of top-down vs. bottom-up and causedriven vs. brand-driven campaigns; • Analysis of short-term vs. long-term effects of social campaigns. This is a sample version. The full report is available to subscribers of warc.com who can download it here. Not a subscriber? Take a free trial. Warc Prize for Social Strategy 2015 SILVER AND SPECIAL AWARD FOR LONG-TERM IDEA SIX WEEK SLEEP CHALLENGE (A.H BEARD) Advertiser: AH Beard Lead agency: Mentally Friendly Country: Australia This case study explains how AH Beard, an Australian mattress manufacturer, overcame being in a low-interest category by creating a Six-Week Sleep Challenge in a social media campaign. Mattresses are a challenging category as every product looks the same and they are purchased infrequently, additionally, 37 10 Seriously Social 2015 – Sample version Seriously Social 2015 AH Beard was unfamiliar to customers and salespeople. While the category focuses on ‘feature’ messages, AH Beard took a new approach, using the Six-Week Sleep Challenge to prove they are experts in sleep and reposition themselves as a consumer-facing brand. From a starting point of zero, AH Beard grew their customer database to 26,000 by delivering on their brand promise of ‘Improving Lives Through Better Sleep’. Read the full case study SILVER FEELINGNUTS (CHECK ONE TWO) Advertiser: Check One Two Lead agency: Jam Country: Global This case study describes how not for profit organisation Check One Two triggered a grassroots movement to raise awareness of testicular cancer in the UK. Men were unwilling to talk about testicular cancer, and other initiatives such as ‘Movember’ had failed to change this as the activism distracted from the issue itself. This campaign kept the focus on testicles, while simultaneously not excluding women from wielding influence over the men in their lives. With no media budget, #FeelingNuts led the fight against cancer one testicle at a time: all you had to do was grab your balls, take a photo and share it with #FeelingNuts, an idea so simple that it actually worked. There were 152,000 conversations on Twitter using the hashtag, building 786 million impressions in less than six months. Read the full case study © Copyright Warc 2015. All rights reserved. © Copyright Warc 2015. All rights reserved. More from Warc CASE FINDER You can find all Warc case studies, including those cited in this report, by searching our unrivalled database, which is organised by campaign objective, country, industry sector, audience, media channels, budget and campaign duration. Find a case. ABOUT WARC Warc.com is an online service offering advertising best practice, evidence and insights from the world’s leading brands. Warc helps clients grow their businesses by using proven approaches to maximise advertising effectiveness. Warc’s clients include the world’s largest advertising and media agencies, research companies, universities and advertisers. 11 Seriously Social 2015 – Sample version CONTACT US LONDON 85 Newman Street London W1T 3EU United Kingdom +44 (0) 20 7467 8100 [email protected] WASHINGTON DC 2233 Wisconsin Ave NW Suite 535 Washington, DC 20007 United States +1 202 778 0680 [email protected] SINGAPORE 20A Teck Lim Road Singapore 088391 +65 3157 6200 [email protected] FOLLOW US © Copyright Warc 2015. All rights reserved.