The campaign is just the start of customer communications
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I spent some time recently with some great digital work from Asia and there was one piece that, for a couple of outrageously big reasons, stood out from the crowd.
A campaign for Pepsi was, on the face of it, a pretty run-of-the-mill on-pack promotion, the kind of bread-and-butter filler we see day in, day out. What made it different was the sheer scale of the response: more than 200m unique visitors, each of whom was vying to get a picture of their face onto the can itself (NMA 06.03.08). The second thing that made it remarkable was the fact that the logistics worked on such a grand scale, not something that happens quite as easily in the UK, in most cases.
You could say it was broadcast mass-market advertising in its truest form. The fact the internet was involved was just what made it possible - the execution, format, delivery and result all took their cues from the traditional world.
What Pepsi was able to take advantage of is a pretty unique moment in time, with a rapidly swelling digital population in a relatively uncluttered marketplace, and an audience hungry for new relationships with brands.
Most brands don't need hundreds of millions of participants for a promotion to qualify as a success. Most of us aren't in China, with its sheer weight of numbers. And most brands aren't a Coca-Cola or a Pepsi so usually can't and don't expect anything approaching this level of mass involvement.
So assuming we don't have the luxury of being able to fall back on our old mass-marketing techniques, clearly we need to be a little bit smarter, especially as the reality in the UK is more muddled.
Real life is messy and complicated as much as it is exciting and inspiring. We all know that we don't experience life as perfect consumers, neatly being exposed to each step of a campaign message. That's why we talk about the importance of engagement, entering into conversations and listening and responding to feedback. Yet rarely do we do this much-talked-about approach justice.
We still see campaigns being planned and bought imagining we're like Pepsi in China. In the vast majority of cases, all of our budgets will be allocated and spent in advance of the campaign going live. Rarely, I suspect, is much cash kept aside for even the most basic of responses to comments from the public, never mind plans to evolve a campaign organically.
What would happen if we allocated half of our budgets for work after the campaign goes live? In fact, what would happen if we got rid of the idea of the campaign altogether? People don't stop experiencing our brands just because the campaign is no longer live. The conversation continues without us.
More advertising is probably not the answer, but we do need real ideas that reflect this real situation we live with day to day. At Glue we're grappling with these issues every day, trying a variety of approaches, looking for interesting new ways to start conversations so we can behave in a more continuous fashion. We haven't thrown off the shackles of the campaign yet, but we'll give it a damn good try.
This approach won't be right for everyone, but if you get the chance, push for a bit more thought, time and money to go into what happens after the campaign goes live, and learn a bit more about real life.
Mark Cridge is CEO of digital creative agency Glue London
