IN-DEPTH CASE STUDIES
LOUISE DURHAM, SOCIAL MEDIA DIRECTOR AT BLONDE
their own objectives and message, while the audience is getting on with their lives. I can guarantee no one out there is going ‘I really want to engage with a piece of branded content. I’m going to go to Facebook and do that right now.’ If your messages and objectives are at the front of your mind you’re not going to get any traction.”
At the heart of IRN-BRU’s
campaign was a cheeky ad created by Blonde’s sister agency Leith. Set in a Scottish maternity ward, a new mum announces to her husband that she’s settled on the name for their wee new bairn. It’s an unexpected choice and dad delivers the punchline: “We cannae call her Fanny.” “We knew this was
RATHER THAN A SOCIAL STRATEGY WE HAVE A ‘SHARING’ STRATEGY”
comedy gold,” says Durham. “It would really appeal to the audience. Launching a TV ad in the social space for an FMCG brand wouldn’t normally feel right. But we knew this was going to be of real interest so we thought, let’s really make something of it.”
IRN-BRU’s manufacturer A.G. Barr
let Blonde have the ad before it launched on TV. Blonde, boldly, decided to launch the ad on social with a single, one-word Tweet:
IRNBRUFanny.com. Users were taken to a homepage where they were invited to join ‘Operation Launch Our Ad’. The plan: select one user, give them the ad’s YouTube URL to Tweet and let social sharing do the rest.
The winner was Rachel, a 23-year old
student with 153 followers on Twitter. Blonde gave Rachel a little pre-launch love (‘Follow @larachie like she was a yellow brick road with a shiny new BRU ad at the end’) and, with 329 followers to her name, the link was Tweeted. Within 24 hours the ad had been
viewed 100,000 times on YouTube. Using Face’s Topsy API, it was possible to track
the spread of activity around the web. “We wanted to test some ideas,” explains Durham. “As part of that we put a message up on our site saying we’re looking for Scotland’s most influential Tweeter. We told people that if they retweeted Rachel’s link we’d create a visualisation of the effect, gauging scientifically who had the most reaction – who was most influential.” Not only did this gain plenty
of traction, it recruited users into the IRN-BRU seeding strategy. Three sharing dynamics emerged. There were a small number of high influence accounts, plenty of small, connected groups and a lot of isolated mentions. Twenty-one days after Rachel’s Tweet the video had been viewed 600,000 times, and it still hadn’t been on TV. What that demonstrates, says
Durham, is that although the initial influencers had a significant impact, what kept the activity going was that people felt the content was worth sharing. Within a month of Rachel’s initial Tweet, the ad had been viewed a million times on YouTube– a record for IRN-BRU. “It’s the idea of creating content and getting it shared amongst these dense networks that’s important,” says Durham. “That’s what we’ve taken onboard as our strategy for day-to-day content. Rather than having a social strategy we have a ‘sharing strategy’.”
MADE FOR INTERACTION So, the success of a campaign like this hinges on peer-to-peer sharing. That didn’t just happen on Twitter, of course. “Facebook is one of our primary channels,” says
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Durham. “It’s where we get the most traction. But we do have an issue with Facebook, which decides how many of the people who ‘Like’ your page are going to see your content. Let’s say you’ve got 100,000 people. On average, only 6.15 per cent of them are going to see your content. And according to research by Ogilvy, if you’ve got over 500,000 people who ‘Like’ your page, only 2.11 per cent are going to see it.” As of October 2014, 302,000 people
‘Like’ the IRN-BRU Facebook page. These users comprise the brand’s ‘actors.’ The full audience, however, is made up of the 13 million people in the UK with a Facebook friend who ‘Likes’ IRN-BRU. “That means sharing and getting people to interact with your content becomes incredibly important.” So, to return to that original
statement of intent, how were Blonde able to determine whether the campaign made a significant, cost effective contribution to brand health? “People have different views on the
importance of different mediums,” says Durham. “Digital can be seen as a poor cousin. So we thought, let’s look at the data and compare Facebook to TV. Now, the only real like-for-like comparison you can do is on impressions. When we looked at the data, in 2013, we saw we had 150 million impressions. With Facebook we had 38 million impressions. So, Facebook gave 20 per cent of the scale at 6.5 per cent of the cost. When you look at those figures and make comparisons with more traditional forms of media - that’s when your CFO could start to understand social’s value and put more into it.”
blonde.net
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