Remember Oreo’s brilliant Dunk in the Dark Super Bowl viral tweet? Generally acclaimed as one of the most brilliant examples of real time marketing done right, and good for a gazillion retweets, mentions, award entries and global praise, it was still a big failure. Bonin Bough, Oreo’s VP of global media and consumer engagement, is not tender when he makes the testament of the Dunk in the Dark: “I see it as the failing of social marketing. We’ve been had by the limits of singular channel trapping.”
Bough does not believe in a specific social strategy (and not in any social roles) in the future, as the existing silos between on- and offline need to be broken down, and social, real time and interactive marketing need to be thought throughout the complete ecosystem. “Can you imagine if we would have been so clever to connect that tweet and Facebook update with the complete broader media ecosystem? That the moment the dark happened we would have been ready to capitalize that across the complete online universe, the new digital out of home, and on television? Fencing it on twitter and Facebook was a huge failure.”
Bough has the data to back it up: “When we analyze our marketing mix models, we see the effectiveness of the message double when we run social content in conjunction with TV. Twice the effectiveness. Count your beans! Imagine if you could make 90% of your media money work twice as hard simply by looking at the evidence, and being clever. You need to measure how the channels are working together, and forget about the old way of working. ” Bough claims that the more integrated organizational changes (integrating mobile) he introduced after the Oreo tweet now deliver more than 10% of overall sales in the US.
Hybrid content centered media ecosystems. I would buy that.
