Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Sometimes a client presents with a great idea.

Tourism New Zealand had worked with Mike Mizrahi in New Zealand to build this enormous, inflatable, multimedia experience to promote New Zealand. It had already wowed audiences and media in London, Paris and Tokyo.

So, as their PR agency, what to you do with something like this?

You get more media and more people through the ball than anywhere else, and push the whole thing into contention for the top ten best examples of how PR & experiential provides value in the marketing mix.

Nice one Sydney Marcomms, you guys rock.

I saw that my old client and employer, 42 Below vodka from New Zealand, had just launched their own type of Augmented Reality experience. It seems like the AR concept is still soup du jour for many in the marcomms fraternity around the world, with more than daily releases, some new, some not so. (Check out http://twitter.com/AugmentedAdvert if you’d like to drink from this gushing hose of digital development.)

The big issue with many of these AR concepts is that they are served to a user sitting in front of a laptop or PC, often miles from a point of purchase, or at the very least a not so small number of clicks. The thing I really like about this 42 Below activation is that it takes this technology right to the point of decision, and about ten steps from a place where a transaction can take place.

Some of you might be asking yourselves why I’m even writing about this digi-kiosk in the first place. I believe this is an example of earned media. Bottle stores are message dense environments where brands uses colour and size of signage  to grab attention and make a sale. The channel owner, the store, will charge a brand for floorspace and promotion either in cash or rebates.

By bringing this fancy piece of kit to the floor, 42 Below articulates a different kind of value proposition, one that sells their products and gives customer a point of discussion to mention the store and increase the amount of traffic. At some point when the market floods with these things, earned will transition back to paid, but for now, i reckon it’s a winner.

It’s Lions time again and once more the PR section of the awards has been dominated by the advertising industry. I thought it might be valuable to share some insights on what had won with my team here at H&K, and now with the rest of you out there in everywhere land.

The big simialrities between the ones that did well were:

1. ROI from a comms perspective, reach or AVE’s mostly.
2. An engaged audience, who can be contacted again.
3. A strong insight led strategy, that flows through all the elements.
4. A demonstrable link to the client’s bottom line, making a difference for the client.
5. An end to end idea, that created a platform for earned media amplification.
6. An innovative execution of the idea, showcasing something that hadn’t been done before.
7. Channel neutral planning, letting the strategy guide channel selection happily including media partners to help grow a story and make it attractive enough to earn media around the world.

Well then, that doesn’t sound to hard. I’ll be sure to wave at you all from the stage next June.

Joviality aside, I thought it was great to see a shift in the awards criteria to reflect the need for great comms to have a demonstrable effect from a business perspective. The qualitative wankiness has been rightly dialed down as advertising’s panacea has lost its ability to close every deal. It’s all about the integrated mix these days, with a result for your client at the end of it.

The first step in developing a campaign for a client in the world of social media has been the identification of a platform of choice, usually based on knowledge about the segmentation of different users, their preferences as a group for a platform or the desired campaign behavior being native to one.

With the ever increasing number of changes to facebook, the API, the page layout and the rules around using the platform to communicate with real life people are starting top wake agencies up to the issues around committing a campaign to a single social platform. What used to be a choice made for manageability might now be a big risk to success.

Social contests, competitions, content production, interaction and crowdsourcing seem as though they’ve become staples of the marcomms landscape with larger players moving money away from traditional ATL into the social web. The social web as newsmaker also seems to be growing in importance, with message integration needing to be as current and as relevant to get the “viral” multiplier effect that we’re chasing as both brands and agencies.

Which brings me to the inspiration for this post. When G-Star and their agency got together to talk about fashion week they chose a very different direction when the got to the platform of choice conversation. They decided to build a platform of choice for the targets of their campaign.

The concept is to find four citizen journalists to cover fashion week in NYC (here’s the link, if you’re keen)

Where the departure from tradition happens is that they’ve asked people to self idenity the channel that best fits them.

If you’re a facebook queen, you need to connect your profile and upload a photo of yourself that shows your love of denim (create personalised, engaging content your friends will comment on.)

If a tweet seems more your style you’ll need a big audience that listens to at least some of what you say and you’ll need to craft 140 characters that get the team at G-Star interested (prove your ability to write platform specific, engaged copy.)

Flip camera owners will need to connect to their YouTube account and share some quality documentary footage that already exists, or some new stuff especially for the content. (Be able to cover the event in a way that really brings it to life.)

If images that are still seem more your style, share your best fashion shot from flickr. (Stylishly capture fashion.)

This to me has real potential, tagging or submitting your photo on facebook should give them the opportunity create an engaged group ready to disseminate content when Fashion Week hits. Cheery picking a twitterer should allow for furious coverage when folks are looking for the lowdown, leading to a bigger share of voice in traditional media. Tie these two amplification strategies to two quality producers of moving and still imagery, house it all on a microsite with inbound and outbound links from the platforms they’ve engaged and you might have a property that leads Google ratings for the year to come.

The real nugget of value is if you’re making a decision about platforms of choice. Try making it about your audience not your administrative overhead.

It seems like integration is a prime focus for many campaigns these days and shifting people through a journey from the gathering attention in the real world, getting them to interact and spread the virus online and finally driving them to a point of sale is a story that any client will buy.

Human’s love to play, our collective history is littered with games. They break the ice, they allow us to interact and make new friends. They encapsulate humor, competition and fun. They’re something we understand.

I love this campaign from Belgium, reaching out to people in the street with an iconic gameset they share, and epitomizes the English way. Wrap in some humor, some competition and a sale at the end off it and you’ve got a great looking, effective (75% year on year uplift) campaign for a type of transport.