Hi I’m Kevin and I work on sponsorship activation at Launch Towers, across many of the sport and CSR accounts. Sometimes the winter seems like it will never end, the cold dark mornings and the short days. I long for something, a sign that will signal the arrival of spring. That something for me has always been the Six Nations, a beacon of light for sports fans in the cold dark days of February. Timing is everything in sport and the same could be said of the world’s oldest, most famous excuse for rugby fans to hit the pub, invite mates round or simply sit glued to your telly for six weeks of rugby-fuelled passion through February and March. Nestled at the fag end of Winter and marking the beginning of Spring means the Six Nations never has to compete with an Olympics, World Cup or European Championship. Its place in the sporting calendar is secure with a potent mix of tradition, excitement, passion, skill and occasion that makes it unique amongst tournaments around the world. The tournament revels in its unpredictability with pre-match favourites (see prediction below) devoured by hostile away fixtures and future world superstars unearthed on a damp afternoon in Dublin, you never quite know what will happen.
So even if you don’t love rugby my advice is to welcome the Six Nations with open arms, get down to the pub and soak up the atmosphere and embrace the coming of spring. My prediction for this year is for France to take the title under new coach Philippe Saint-André and perhaps the Grand Slam. The chasing pack is a little trickier to predict but here goes. England, even though they are 2011 Champions, feel like they are starting from scratch and Ireland and Wales’ season could be defined by what happens in their first game on the 5th February when they go head to head. Scotland are improving and could provide a few shocks while Italy have a new coach and low expectations which could work in their favour.
Whatever happens the Six Nations is an opportunity to catch up with old friends, watch some great rugby and hopefully see plenty more moments like this…
Do you want to work in a dynamic, challenging agency working with some of the UK’s top brands? Who wouldn’t?!
We are currently looking for great people to join us at various levels across the business – from graduates to senior roles, and we might just have the perfect opportunity for you.
Our all-channel offering isn’t just great news for clients, but also for our people too, as it means they get exposure to every part of the marketing mix – regardless of level, or department. Our consultants work hard to produce breathtaking campaigns – just read our blog to see some of the highlights from the past few months.
If you’re interested in joining our team, please send your CV & covering letter to cvs@launchgroup.co.uk. And we’ll be in touch if we’d like to set up an interview. (no agencies please)
Hi, I’m Katrina, I recently joined the All-Channel Launch team working mainly on Tesco and BP.
Having only been a Launcher for 6 working weeks this week heralded my first piece of experiential activity and the opportunity to spend a day with former Olympian and hurdling legend, Colin Jackson CBE. It just so happens that Colin is one of the nicest men you will ever meet and just as well as we were asking him to run his first ever half marathon on before of the Tesco Great School Run. This he did with consummate ease and a big smile on his face the whole way round.
Prior to my arrival, Launch had taken the brief to raise awareness of the 2012 Tesco Great School Run ( a 2k fun run staged at schools across the UK encouraging children, family, friends and teachers to take part in exercise for fun) and encourage other children/schools to sign up. The idea was simple yet effective – get Colin to run between the primary schools in Westminster to thank them for signing up to this year’s run and spur on kids to take part. The response we had from schools and kids alike was fantastic and far exceeded our expectations. The best way to give a snapshot of the day is by numbers:
15 miles run
1000+ kids met
100 Autographs signed
20,000 steps taken
500 high fives
150+ banners made
5 London Landmarks
It is not every day you get to work with a British sporting legend but seeing the response from the kids along the way was truly refreshing and I would recommend it to anyone! Coverage included: The Sun, The Guardian, TalkSport, The Mirror, The People, MSN to name a few.
Monitoring specific websites and keywords online is critical to keep up to date with the latest trends associated with your clients, as well as understand what your clients’ competitors are talking about.
Using a combination of manual searching and automatic tools, it is relatively easy to keep up-to-date with what is being said about your client and relevant topics.
However, as well as monitoring conversations, it is also important to identify who your top influential – client friendly – bloggers are, who you should be regularly engaging with, as well as being aware of any potential negative bloggers. This will enable you to monitor for relevant posts, understand the sentiment around an issue and tackle any potential situation early on.
After all, one of the best ways to identify and tackle a problem, that may escalate if left alone is to ensure you track online conversations about your clients.
Below are some essential tools and tips to help you monitor conversations effectively:
Google Alerts: In addition to setting up daily or even hourly alerts for a series of keywords that you have identified that may be relevant for your client, you will also need to set-up alerts for your key spokespeoples’ names
Whilst Google Alerts can be very helpful, they can flood your inbox with results so it is important to only set keywords alerts and review them as soon as they hit your inbox – do not put it off!
Twitter: Identify and follow the influential journalists and bloggers relevant to your client, as they will be the ones most likely to spot issue and make them public. Tweets often create specific hashtags when an issue is breaking (e.g. #hacking) and these can be picked up by Google. Twitter also has a basic search function where you can set up automatic alerts. TweetDeck is the best tool for monitoring mentions on Twitter
Key industry and enthusiast websites and blogs: Identify who these are, and regularly check RSS feeds. Ensure you know which sites are likely to be negative. Monitor these very closely anyway, but particularly during any announcement. Tracking an RSS feed from these sites can help to alert you when a new post has been written
Now that you understand what tools to use to monitor and track local noise, it is vital that you define your objectives. Monitoring anything in isolation is a pointless exercise. You should incorporate the insights and information gathered to your advantage, to enhance your communications plan and enable you to reach a larger audience.
Do get in touch if you’d like to discuss our all-channel approach in more detail and how we can help you with your online conversations.
You may remember this time last year, the Launch Virgin Holidays team were braving the cold and attempting the World Record for the World’s Largest Burlesque Dance?
Well, in December, Virgin Holidays tasked us with the brief to launch their famous sale once again, alongside the opening of their first stand-alone store in High Street Kensington and in true Launch style we wanted to out-do our previous work!
We decided this year to attempt the record for The Longest Swimwear Queue, again in keeping with Virgin’s cheeky reputation, and bold enough to generate some top notch coverage.
Launch fired on all channels and the experiential, digital and media relations teams pulled together to produce some amazing results.
Coverage included Daily Mirror, The Times, The Mail on Sunday, Daily Star, Evening Standard and Metro, along with The Sun Online, Daily Telegraph Online, This is London, FHM Online, Talk Talk and many more.
Online communities form whenever people with common interests are able to interact. This could mean the ‘community’ is a forum, profile page, blog, group or any other similar space, and these interactions can take the form of buying, selling, collaborating or simply the coming together of likeminded individuals around a specific topic.
When they come together, these groups can have a huge impact on businesses – both positively and negatively. For example, a negative review left by disgruntled customer could dissuade others from engaging with the same company, but a group that have independently assembled in support of a company, product or service represent a golden opportunity to utilise their passion. By managing online communities themselves, brands are in a position to influence public perception and build long-lasting relationships with influencers – the results of which can be incredibly fruitful.
Despite the obvious power of online communities, many brands still struggle with the concept of interacting with customers and would-be customers in this way. Here are our top community management tips:
Engage: Managing, or simply contributing to online communities gives you the opportunity to engage in multi-way conversations. However, it should never be considered merely as a channel topromote your latestproduct or service. Communities give you the chance to grow relationships long-term and provide your members with something genuinely useful and interesting (think news, images, video or a unique point of view). Before creating or engaging with a community you should consider just what exactly you will be offering your audience in return for their interest
Dedicate Resource: Communities take time and patience to grow, and this means that you need a committed resource manage it. The absolute biggest inhibitor for any community member is the feeling that their contributions are going unheard or unnoticed, so it’s vital that community managers ‘show’ their faces on a regular basis. This means finding a way to engage with your audience on their level
Show Personality: You may be in a position of authority, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a personality. In fact, we’d say it’s mandatory. Consumers are far more comfortable engaging with a familiar face as opposed to a nondescript company ‘entity’ that shows no warmth or passion. All of your interactions should match the personalities of the audience you are engaging
Monitor, but don’t over-censor: Of course there needs to be clear rules for the community you are managing, but there is a fine line between maintaining a calm space and debilitating freedom of speech. Outline at the very beginning what is acceptable and what is not
Be Adaptable: Communities are living, breathing entities,and you should expect them to grow and change.Keep members in the loop whenever this happens, such as when new features or tools are being added or removed. Think hard about your audience – how can your community better serve them?
Measure Performance: This is essential in growing your community and adapting content when necessary. Everything from sentiment analysis to Google Analytics will highlight opportunities for improvement and areas that aren’t working as hard as they should
It’s the end of the year, and I’m a big fan of making lists (I always do my top ten albums of the year without fail), so I thought put together a short list of my favourite All-Channel campaigns from the past 12 months.
Not in any particular order (although obviously all of the Launch campaigns would be top of the list if we were ranking them). And also, even though my own specialism is digital, this is not a list of ten digital campaigns. However, most of them do have a strong digital element (but of course)
Here we go:
Betty Crocker – Whoopie Moments
You can read more about our All-Channel Betty Crocker campaign in the case study here, but to give you an executive summary: we built a bespoke Facebook app on the Betty Crocker UK page for fans to ‘share’ or ‘give’ whoopie moments (little bite size moments of joy) in celebration of Whoopie Pies launching in the UK. 12,000 new fans and 750 competition entries later, we’d spread joy around the UK (and Ireland) and made a considerable splash for Betty Crocker.
Heinz Get Well Soup
OK, so I did say this wasn’t a list of ten digital campaigns. However, I reserve the right to put digital campaigns in here. And I absolutely loved the simple genius of We Are Social’s Heinz Get Well Soup campaign. Launched at the beginning of cold and flu season, users could go onto the Heinz Soup Facebook page (using a specially designed app) and send sick friends a personalised can of Heinz soup. That’s it. A sentiment perfectly in keeping with the brand’s identity, and real ROI for Heinz (they obviously charged for the service). Very clever.
The Vaccines – User generated Instagram music video
Another campaign that I have blogged about before (complain if you like, but it’s my list) but it really was an inspired piece of theory and execution. The Vaccines partnered with Instagram and encouraged fans and photo-enthusiasts to upload their summer festival pics to a bespoke microsite. From the resulting images, a music video was cut together showcasing the best of the work. Great user generated content, viewed by (as of December 2011) one million people, saving Sony Music cash (real ROI) in the process. Genius.
Launch were approached by Virgin Holidays to generate mass awareness for their January sale, so we put together a big, quick-to-execute All-Channel campaign that secured coverage in the Metro, Daily Mirror, Evening Standard, The Times and The Daily Star. We took the idea of a ‘summer holiday’ in December as our motif, and held the world’s largest ever swimwear queue outside Virgin Holidays brand new swimwear emporium on High Street Kensington. It’s a great example of our all-channel approach, bringing together experiential and social media that results in fantastic media coverage.
Jay-Z – Decoded
At Launch, we’re well-schooled when it comes to combining experiential and digital, so it made us all warm ‘n’ fuzzy to see an outdoor + digital campaign rewarded at this year’s Cannes Lions awards. For the launch of Jay-Z’s autobiography, ‘Decoded’, agency Droga5 put every page of the book in a real world location. The digital element of the campaign came through a Bing Maps-enabled scavenger hunt, allowing the audience to uncover clues and locate pages.
A big idea, a truckload of ambition (exactly what you’d expect from Jay-Z) and big client demands all resulted in a truly innovative and memorable campaign.
Capital One – Credit Made Clearer
If you mention credit cards to people, they’ll probably talk about their latest purchases, or how they have a mountain of debt to pay off. They probably won’t know their current APR or what travel insurance cover they have as standard. That was the challenge Launch faced when Capital One asked us to help build consumer awareness of their Credit Made Clearer initiative. So we put together an All-Channel campaign that mixed handing out information to people in airport departure lounges, organising competitions and a blogger panel with a range of family, parenting and personal finance influencers, alongside three media relations stories that looked at lack of awareness around the detail of credit cards. The results? 18 pieces of national coverage, 502 pieces of coverage overall, and credit card awareness in the front of the paper, instead of the back.
Something of a theme here, with campaigns using maps APIs to create great content. Red Bull’s collaboration with Google Street View is another example of simple ideas always being the best. Red Bull used its clout to compile a database of the best street art from around the globe, then created a simple web portal that uses Google’s Street View technology and allows you to view the art in situ. It’s almost like being there.
Looking a little further afield, this campaign from Australia caught my eye. The National Australia Bank, to try and dissociate itself from the other major Aussie banks, publicly broke up with them on Valentine’s Day. This simple idea was moulded and adapted into an All-Channel approach – 60 couples broke up in public places, creating news stories and video content. The campaign also extended to press, outdoor, radio, mobile billboards, street teams, street chalking, and helicopter banners. The effort also ambushed execs from the other banks in their offices and elsewhere. Bold, typically Australian, but undoubtedly effective.
The NatWest Secret Cricketer
Sometimes, marketing campaigns simply make you smile. This is exactly what NatWest’s Secret Cricketer videos did for me. The bank signed up former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan, and persuaded him to dress up as an old man, and turn out for officially the worst cricket team in the UK. Their opponents needed to be none the wiser, and so he strode out into the middle and unleashed his signature cover drive. I would suggest you watch the video to find out what happened next.
Heard of The Banker? It’s an FT-owned publication, and as such, is subject to media compete issues when it comes to securing coverage. Launch ripped up that issue this year when creating awareness around The Banker’s annual ‘Top 1000 World Banks’ industry rankings. Using a mixture of briefings, news hijacking and good old fashioned news hooks, we secured 22 pieces of national / international coverage, as well as nine pieces of broadcast – across BBC, CNBC and Sky News. Highly targeted, highly talkable and hugely impressive. Even if we do say so ourselves.
Put together an all-channel PR and digital campaign to launch the new range of Betty Crocker Whoopie Pies in the UK
Challenge
Both Betty Crocker and Whoopie Pies are already well known in the United States, neither has strong penetration in the UK
Strategy
Working closely with General Mills, Launch Group helped come up with the concept of ‘Whoopie Moments’: those little unexpected and amusing moments which make you ‘whoop with joy’. It could be the time you baked the perfect brownie for someone special, or when your partner surprised you with a gift
Launch Group designed and built a bespoke Facebook application for Betty Crocker’s UK page. It allowed fans to ‘Share’ their Whoopie Moments for a chance to win prizes, or ‘Nominate’ others to receive a Whoopie Moment of their own
The Facebook application formed the focus for ALL of the marketing around the launch of Whoopie Pies: TV advertising included a call to action to ‘Share your Whoopie Moment’, as did the radio advertising. Facebook advertising and PPC activity (run by Launch) also helped to drive traffic to the app
A full PR campaign, including a launch XP event at the Good Housekeeping kitchen, perfectly complemented the digital and ATL activity – providing mainstream coverage with a call to action to visit Facebook
Results
750 competition entries across the two mechanics housed within the app
An increase in 12,000 fans of the Betty Crocker UK Facebook page
34,000 views of the Whoopie Moment tab
4,800 people talking about the page at the campaign’s peak
17 pieces of PR coverage (including the Mail Online)
As marketing strategies continue to evolve and adapt to the online shift, understanding and utilising the new tools at your disposal in the correct way is critical to effective All-Channel campaigns. So with that in mind, just what is PPC advertising? How does it work? And why should I care? Sit back, grab a tea, and I’ll tell you…
So, PPC, heard of it? Any guesses? A quick office poll produced ‘Please Prepare Canapes’, ‘Post Party Crying’ or, my particular favourite, ‘People Prefer Cats’. Amusing though these suggestions may be, the answer is, of course, a little more conventional. For the uninitiated PPC stands for Pay Per Click advertising.
What is it?
First off the basics, when you search for something on Google it will give you two different types of results: natural listings and sponsored links. Natural listings are free, generated by Google’s algorithms and are dependent on SEO (an acronym for another time and another cup of tea). What we are interested in today are the sponsored links. These are paid for results which appear at the top in the orange box.
Google’s PPC advertising is in essence a real-time auction in which you bid on keywords that you would like your ad to appear beside when searched. You only pay when somebody clicks on your link and thus you pay per click, ergo PPC! Simple!
The order that these results appear (the ranking) will be dependent on the popularity of your search term. The more popular a search term is the more companies there will be competing over it. Those with the highest bid and those with adverts whose copy is most relevant to the search term will appear at the top of the list.
What does it achieve?
What are the benefits to your brand? Simply put – visibility. The ads will generate traffic to your website, targeted leads and instant sales. The beauty of PPC though is its flexibility. You can adjust your budget as you see fit in a system which really does give back relative to what you put in. You can test keywords and track your conversions to keep an iron grip on exactly where your advertising budgets are going, one of the notable differences between online and traditional advertising.
As with all elements of digital marketing, using PPC on its own would leave you with a limited online strategy , however if implemented wisely as part of an All-Channel campaign PPC advertising can be invaluable, lucrative and in most cases absolutely essential.
Next week we will be covering the yin to PPC’s yang, SEO. If you have any questions or would like to find out how PPC could work for you, send us a tweet @LaunchGroup or an email to hello@launchgroup.co.uk.
The answer to the question – ‘which platforms should I be using in social media?’ – is pretty simple really. Most digital practitioners would agree (in broad terms) that it’s merely a case of identifying where conversations relevant to you are happening online, and then coming up with a way to join those conversations without intruding and causing a backlash.
Social media, at its core, is no different to other comms channels. As our CEO Johnny Pitt pointed out in his recent all-channel PR post, the key to creating a successful all-channel campaign or presence is to select the right channel to reach your target audience. This is equally true whether you are integrating social media into existing marcomms activity, or putting together a standalone digital campaign.
Additionally, having an idea of what the endgame is going to be – what success looks like – is key to using these digital channels effectively. Consider your use of social media and digital channels in marketing in a similar way to the process of writing a good story. You should know what the ending of the tale is going to be before you start.
It might be that you want to generate product sales through digital advertising, or protect your reputation through the effective monitoring of conversations online. Whatever you do, be rigorous with your measurement and evaluation, and be realistic about what you can achieve. Success doesn’t happen overnight, even if in some cases it seems that way.
That’s exactly what we believe in at Launch. Identifying the key channels-to-market and communicating a message to a specific audience. This means working with our clients collaboratively to put campaigns in place, not pushing them down a particular route to fulfil our own agendas. Setting ambitious – but realistic – targets that are going to make a tangible difference to our client’s bottom line. And above all, doing great work that is backed by brilliant thinking.
Rushing into setting up a Facebook page or building a microsite may seem like a good idea initially, but if you truly want to build a long term, successful presence in the digital world, putting time and effort into identifying the best channel and tying down your key message ise of paramount importance.
Get in touch if you’d like to discuss our all-channel approach in more detail
