If you are in advertising, marketing or communications, you better be prepared for FFWD Advertising and Marketing Week. Thankfully, we have compiled a Survival Guide for everything you need to know for FFWD AdWeek, from the best pre and post event places to entertain clients to what you should be tweeting and everything in between. If you find yourself in the company of that key contact you’ve been dying to meet, you need to at least sound like you know what you are talking about. Lucky for you, we have done the research for you, in everything from industry trends like the creative newsroom to new social platforms like Jelly and thought-provoking advertising campaigns.
Hot Industry Trend: Creative Newsroom
These days, everyone is buzzing about creative newsrooms or war rooms, and you should be too. Here is why:
1. It’s a new process for real-time marketing, and one that is catching on quickly.
Real-time marketing – multi-channel engagement based upon real-time insights – was all the rage in 2013. A 2012 study by GolinHarris demonstrates that real-time can raise all the desirable marketing metrics for a variety of reasons and RTM has since grabbed more attention as a must-have for any modern marketing mix. Creative newsrooms are a natural byproduct. Essentially, creative newsrooms or war rooms, act as command centre, with several employees monitoring multiple screens who develop content with feeds from every social network, especially during major events like the Super Bowl or Grammys.
2. The hype with creative newsrooms and war rooms comes out of huge brand social and viral successes.
A prime example of this was Oreo’s reaction to the blackout during Super Bowl 2013, when they tweeted “You can still dunk in the dark,” accompanied by a simple product image, which was retweeted thousands of times. The fact that the highly successful campaign was so simple highlights the influence of the real-time marketing process.
Oreo’s agency, 360i, had created a command centre specifically for the Super Bowl, which included a 15-person social media monitoring team along with artists, strategists, and brand executives assigned to produce content on the spot. Another example is Nokia’s ‘Imitation is the best form of flattery’ tweet, a jab against Apple after they released the iPhone 5c on September 10th, with its many bright colours, a similar look to Nokia’s multi-coloured Lumias. The tweet, of course, included an image of the Lumias. The US Nokia Twitter account got over 8,000 retweets for that note and the UK Nokia Twitter went viral, with over 38,000 retweets. In the wake of such successes, a growing number of brands are looking to jump on the real-time marketing bandwagon.
3. Brands are now insisting on this viral sort of real-time marketing.
Agencies are taking a cue from the newsroom structure to react in real-time with a real-time marketing war room. This requires leveraging advanced social media listening and monitoring skills to keep tabs on hot topics, trends and reactions. Of course, this concept requires a degree of flexibility and highly influential brands must obviously place a large amount of trust in the judgment and responsiveness of employees and their ability to think quickly, intellectually and creatively. After all, once it has been posted, it is out there forever. It doesn’t work for everyone. War rooms are increasingly set up to leverage major media events like the Super Bowl and the upcoming Olympic Games, popular TV show premieres and finales, and awards shows like the Oscars and Grammys. Many brands, like Gatorade and Nissan, get the most benefit from operating their war rooms year-round. Increasingly, brands are insisting on it.
4. Consumers increasingly expect brands to operate in real-time.
Consumers now expect that brands respond to events, crisis, controversy and consumer complaints practically the instant they happen. Being able to operate in real-time allows brands to increase consumer engagement and trust, if done properly. Not to mention, to do so is to publically demonstrate a customer service commitment. In aligning content with trending topics and relevant concepts to their brand and audience, brands are brought back to life and seen for more than the business and for having their finger on the pulse of what is happening in the world. Are creative newsrooms something you should consider?
New Social platform: Jelly
The brand new social network site Jelly will be a hot conversation topic this AdWeek. Just ask whether the other person is on Jelly. Simple. If they don’t know what it is, you can take the pleasure of explaining it. In short, it is a question-and-answer-based social network by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, which was launched earlier this month on iOS and Android. Keeping with the real-time rage, Jelly users find answers to their questions in real time by crowdsourcing opinions from their social networks. Users snap a photo, ask a question, and get answers from connections in their social networks. The point? There are some questions that just can’t be answered with a simple Google search. It connects to either Facebook or Twitter and also links you to friends of friends, meaning you can still connect with other users, even if none of your Facebook friends or people you follow on Twitter are using the service.
Notable New Advertising Campaigns
Of course another hot topic will definitely be Sochi Advertising: What ads are getting you pumped for the games? Before you hit the AdWeek party circuit or client dinners, here are five ads that we find notable that you should know…
Team Canada: We Are Winter Campaign. (Out of home and video).
SportChek. What It Takes (OOH and video).
Industry trends are just part of it when it comes to networking at AdWeek. Make sure you keep up on current events in the world in general – whether the arts, sports or business news – because you never know who you will end up chatting with.
#LYNL | (Live Your Notable Life)
Cover image by: blog.vendhq.com
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