“Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half”
On the 14th of October 2014 at 2pm the first event of DICE’s presentation series took place, the subject: get social!
Appropriate to this topic, the DCU managed to get seven top-class speakers to inform us about their work, passion and goals.
The stage and my seat position!
First of all I want you to give you a quick overview over the different speakers and their topics and enterprises:
1) Dr. Theo Lynn Business Innovation Platform Director at Dublin City University.
2) Deirdre Hogan from GAJO.
3) Jane McDaid from THINKHOUSE.
4) Lucy Campbell from RTÉ
5) Alan Coleman from Wolfgang Digital.
6) Nicolas Cappiello from LinkedIn
7) Eric Weaver from IPG MediaBrands.
I Dr. Theo Lynn is Business Innovation Platform Director at DCU, after being introduced spoke about different research fields currently processed at our University:
I The M.A.D. Skills- stands for Magnetic Agile Deep and is a new method to handle the bigger and bigger growing data pile of nowadays society.
II SportsVantage a platform to share massive amount of data during sport events.
III A very interesting point in my opinion was the section of him talking about a phenomenon that gained a sad fame during the last years: Cyber Bullying. With the help of new analysis technology it shall be possible to identify Cyber Bullying even though there are no explicit forms of Bullying language used, according to Dr. Lynn this also works across different languages and regardless of cultural differences, a very exciting idea!
Mr Lynn started out the whole event and even though he didn’t talk for a long time, he left a positive impression, being a professor of DCU working in research about important topics like Cyber Bullying.
II Deirdre Hogan is a graduate from DCU’s Business School and currently starting up an own company: GAJO. GAJO shall be used as sort of a “filter” to eliminate irrelevant content (for advertisers) on social media platforms. GAJO shall also allow demographic filtering, so that the advertisers can directly promote their products to their specific age group increasing the efficiency of their ads and therefore their overall costs. Deirdre Hogans GAJO project sounds quite interesting but in some ways there might still be some issues with the functioning of this method, maybe it’s just that i can’t believe that program working accurately. Anyway it is great to see how DCU Business School graduates pursue their goals and become company founders.
III Third speaker was Jane McDaid Senior Digital Manager at Thinkhouse she mainly spoke about video content getting more and more important for consumer decisions. There are 1 Billion people watching 7 Billion hours of video content online every month. In the following I listed the “7 Sins of Killer Content” seven different ways that can make a video ad go viral.
1) LOL Generally just means a funny video according to Jane McDaid (and the audience as well) people tend to react really positive to humorous advertisement.
2) EPIC: An Epic advertisement simply documents something great being achieved.
3) Emotive advertisements want to create emotions, slow and deep music is often used to create a melancholic atmosphere.
4) WTF: So called WTF commercials seem to be completely weird and different from other advertisement and therefore stand out.
5) “Zeitgeist”: The question zeitgeist commercials are dealing with is “What are people caring about today?” Zeitgeist commercials need to be up to date. One famous example is advertisement with the so called “Harlem Shake”.
6) NSFW: Not Safe For Work commercials often include voluptuous content, and are therefore often extremely funny and have a great success potential as “Sex Sells”. NSFW commercials are even more interesting for smaller companies who want to gain a lot of attention in a short period of time.
7) Informative commercials are as their name implies mostly made to show the product and it’s advantages to the customers.
In my opinion one of the most interesting speeches during the whole event! What I thought about all the time is: Which kind of video advertisement would fit for which kind of company? I think especially smaller and upcoming enterprises can strongly benefit from LOL or NSFW commercials as their potential to go viral and create huge amounts of attention is fairly high. As I am quite interested in the advertisement sector I find this topic really absorbing and will now try to categorize ads into the “7 Sins of Killer Content” when I see them.
The only thing I could criticize, is that Jane McDaid didn’t really expand onto the company THINKHOUSE itself, which I personally find really interesting and attractive, for example she didn’t mention career options.
IV Lucy Campbell Marketing Director of RTÉ Television was up next on the stage, as the TV is being outrun by new media slow but steady television transmitters need to optimize content across multiple platforms such as PC’s, Laptops, Tablets or Smartphones to remain competitive. A fascinating fact is the age distribution Lucy Campbell mentioned:
As you can see in the diagram, the average age of TV users is much higher than the average age of Smartphone video users, which means that videos on mobile devices will massively gain importance in the next decade. That seems to be a huge problem for television transmitters like RTÉ Television but can also be a chance to reinvent entertainment.
When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.
In my opinion the RTÉ Television is quite a pioneer when it comes to integration of several platforms into the program, which brings me to the question how other television transmitters handle this inevitable process. As I am from Germany I would like to compare RTÉ Television with the most famous German private television transmitter “RTL”.
Mrs. Campbell also talked about the other transmitter belonging to RTÉ Television, RTÉ 2 but I felt like this was more for promotion purposes than for really informing us about it. Nevertheless I liked her speech if “traditional” television transmitters are still deemed to be old-fashioned and uncool, RTÉ Television proofs the contrary.
V: Next up on stage: Alan Coleman CEO of Wolfgang Digital an award winning, upcoming digital marketing enterprise who invented the Wolfgang Formula.
“On the 16th of August 2013 Google went black which gave the great opportunity to finally measure its influence on global data travel.”
Alan Coleman
(source: http://www.cnet.com/news/google-outage-reportedly-caused-big-drop-in-global-traffic/)
As you can see the global data travel dropped extremely during the downtime of google between 23:54pm and 23:59pm that meant a huge loss for almost anybody offering or advertising something on the internet. Which leads to the saying:
“Google makes the wwworld go round.”
Nevertheless, Google is not the only company with a giant reach and influence, the website with the greatest reach worldwide is facebook.com which, according to Alan Coleman still fights against Google for users, and advertisements.
Alan Coleman mentioned the “Marketing Valhalla” which is the best thing to happen to an enterprise being present on social media platforms. It literally means that the customers share their (positive) opinions about the company online and share these experiences with their friends, which means a massive amount of free advertisement.
One of the biggest problems of the digital marketing industry and the marketing industry in general is the lacking reliability of advertisement, Mr. Coleman showed a statistic claiming that advertisement is clearly more effective if it comes from real people sharing their individual experiences with the product.
In general I felt like the presentation of Alan Coleman was authentic and honest, you could really feel that he was engaged and envolved in what he’s doing. I liked it.
VI: Last but one speaker on stage was Nicolas Cappiello EMEA Sales Director at LinkedIn which is a Social networking service. He started out talking about the “Power of the Network” supporting the inalienability of Social networking services like LinkedIn. According to his speech, the most important thing in social neworking is content.
“Everything is about content”
-Nicolas Cappiello
And where does that content come from? From peers, and global leaders spreading their ideas.
Unfortunately Mr. Cappiellos speech was quite short and regrettably I didn’t get to know many things about how LinkedIn really works and his personal experiences.
VII: Last but not least it was Eric Weavers turn to inform us about his Enterprise Mediabrands Worldwide, a company that plans and conducts social media campaigns for numerous enterprises all over the world.
“The Great 2014 Social Media Crisis of Faith”
-Eric Weaver (Chief Social Officer Mediabrands Worldwide)
What Mr. Weaver meant to state with this quote was the rapid change of the Internet and its content, nobody really knows what will be hyped in the next year. That’s what makes social media marketing campaigns so difficult, because the taste of the customers and the content of the internet is changing. Nevertheless there are some extremely prosperous social media campaigns such as the OREO daily twist celebrating the 100th anniversary of Oreo with a 100 day long social media campaign, the results were outstanding:
“Oreo became a living, breathing part of culture – and people looked at the brand in a completely new way. The brand saw a 280 percent increase in Facebook shares and 510 percent increase in retweets on Twitter. The content series garnered more than 1 million Likes on Facebook. Oreo became a fixture in the press for the duration of the campaign, earning praise and mention from leading news outlets, with the thousands of placements producing more than 230 million earned media impressions.” (source:http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/campaigns/oreo-daily-twist.html)
As you can see, social marketing campaigns can have tremendous success, or just drown in the endless internet without being noticed. As we can see in the quote, there was an increase of Facebook likes, shares and retweets on Twitter but how should a company measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign? This is one of the questions Mediabrands Worldwide was asking themselves as an increase of likes/shares etc. does not always mean an increase of sale. Money invested in social media has no direct feedback on sales, so how is a CEO of a company supposed to justify his efforts on social media ads?
Moreover, social media advertising is not free, as Facebook forced Facebook page owners to pay money to reach all their followers, that is why companies present on social media platforms have to be even more aware of their cost-benefit analysis.
To measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign Mediabrands Worldwide established a system giving consumer action a value:
-Consumer rating : 0,42$
-Review : 0,44$
-Online Share : 0,92$
-direct recommendation: 0,94$
Likes are not being considered because they have still not proven their value when it comes to social media marketing, and people talking and engaging is much more important than likes.
So Mediabrands Worldwide can now measure the value of a social media campaign and according to Eric Weaver the most important thing is to get people active because, as I already mentioned above, the most trustworthy advertising is positve feedback from customers.
Summing up it can be said that social media campaigns are risky, but have a great potential of overwhelming success, and Mediabrands Worldwide makes Social Media Ad’s measurable, by giving the feedback of customers a value and thus helping companies to analyse their success and set up a cost-benefit analysis.
All in all I likes Eric Weavers presentation the most, not only because he had some really interesting and mindblowing facts to tell, but also because of the positive and open atmosphere he created, after 3,5 h of listening and note-taking the first conference #getsocial ended, it was a great experience and an important topic as social media marketing is becoming more and more important.
-By Jonas Schoell 27/10/14
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