Last week we explored MasterCard’s 2013 Brits activation, but during Wednesday night’s ceremony it was quick response ambush work from paint brand Dulux that won our ‘Marketing Around The Brits’ award.
Much like Oreo’s swift Twitter response to the power cut at the Super Bowl earlier in the month, Dulux had its own low latency moment (although on a lesser scale) when it leveraged consumer interest in the Brit Awards statuettes.
For the 2013 ceremony, the award statues themselves were designed by superstar artist Damien Hirst in his signature ‘coloured dots’ pattern.
Indeed, the Hirst signature dots also formed part of the umbrella Brits 2013 imaging and iconography as they were included on behind-the-scenes backdrops and in the set designs.
While the awards ceremony was still being broadcast live on ITV, the quick thinking Dulux marketers sent out a cheeky tweet with an image of the dotted statue alongside the colours it used in the form of a Dulux colour chart.
The Tweet’s text read: ‘Looks like Damien Hirst may have used some of our favourites on the #BRITs2013 award!’.
The tweet itself was the work of Dulux’s digital agency AnalogFolk and it was turned round within a few hours.
The agency’s social strategy director Stephen Pirrie explained that the team had devised a framework and strategy for reactive posts that enabled it to plan for known-upcoming events and to be able to move quickly.
‘We are in the process of talking through our approach with all our social clients and they are very positive towards it,’ said Pirrie. ‘We knew The Brits would represent a very high volume of conversation on social platforms, dominated by Twitter so we planned to create a piece of content that wouldn’t simply piggyback the hashtag, but would offer the brand’s own perspective on the event. The 2013 statue design was a bit of a gift really [as] it was so well suited to Dulux’s belief in the power of colour.’
The tweet certainly effectively expressed Dulux’s colour positioning and it also supported its own ‘Let’s Colour Awards’ which celebrate colour creativity. In fact, the initial tweet was followed up with tweets promoting the ‘Let’s Colour Awards’.
Dulux wasn’t the only guerrilla brand to leverage this year’s Brits through social media platforms. Taking a different approach and activating before the awards (rather than during them), agency Cake demonstrated its ability to understand consumer sentiment through social media traffic analysis.
The agency pre-releasing an infographic with its own predictive award winners forecast using its social media content analytics skills.
While some of its predictions proved correct, others were less successful, illustrating that you can’t prove everything through social media opinion.
Comment:
Like the Oreo blackout tweet, this low latency creativity and real-time response not only demonstrated speed of marketer thought, but also shows that brands can earn significant benefits without spending huge sums simply by being switched on to events as they unfold and leveraging live through social media moments.
It is tough to find an appropriate reach and value metric, but while the Dulux tweet failed to gain anything like the kind of social media traction that Oreo’s Super Bowl social ad did (indeed, it was only retweeted 30 or so times and favourited by 15 people), it has certainly been gaining a lot of value through the following day’s media coverage – both online and in print.
The lesson here is that the right kind of real-time thinking can pay dividends.
Links:
Dulux Twitter
Dulux Website
AnalogFolk Website
Cake Website
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