Case sTuDy 16
The challenge
Foster’s wanted to use the power of digital interaction to promote the brand’s iconic ‘no worries’ attitude in the UK. The company asked London-based interactive agency Play to help out.
Target audience
The principal target audience was 18- to 24-year-old males.
Action
Play came up with the idea of using people’s social media posts as a barometer of the country’s ‘no worries’ attitude, and ranking people, places and celebrities
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on a custom-built website. Twitter had exploded in the UK, as it had in the United States, and was selected by the Play team as the ideal barometer of real-time sentiments for the digital nation. With the help of a statistical linguist specializing in artificial intelligence, the team crafted a custom built algorithm, dubbed ‘The Ozometer’, that would analyse tweets (Twitter posts) in real time and give them a ‘No Worries’ rating based not just on individual words, but also on sentence structure, word pattern, sentiment and context.
‘The Ozometer’ provided a real-time snapshot of Britain’s ‘No Worries’ atti- tudes, and fed into the ‘No Worries’ leader board on the Ozometer website, which displayed the leading ‘No Worries’ individuals, celebrities and places in the country at any given time. As the online buzz started to grow, the team started to reward tweeting celebrities for their best ‘No Worries’ tweets, with relevant and carefully thought out prizes that prompted those celebrities to tweet about the campaign and the brand, helping to spread the ‘No Worries’ message to even more Twitter followers.
To promote and maintain high levels of media coverage, the Play team took the data generated by the Ozometer and used it to compile surveys of the ‘No Worries’ attitudes of key groups of people likely to prove popular with their target demographic. They released statistics like the top 20 ‘No Worries’ pre- miership football managers, and the top ‘No Worries’ X Factor contestants which were eagerly lapped up by the media, who created pages of valuable editorial coverage, and even printed the ‘No Worries’ leader boards.
Results
The campaign really captured the imagination of online consumers and, tell- ingly, tweeting celebrities with enormous Twitter followings, which helped kick-start viral propagation on Twitter and across other social media sites. The real measure of success for this campaign though was the huge amount of coverage and exposure it gained across both high-profile websites and high- impact offline publications – particularly national tabloid newspapers and men’s lifestyle magazines and websites with broad appeal among the target demographic.
127 The Ozometer
Stories about tweeting celebrities and their ‘least’ or ‘most’ no-worries atti- tudes were prominent across popular mass media, and the regular ‘surveys’ of key target groups maintained the momentum so that the brand and the campaign message was reinforced and magnified over time.
All of this online and offline coverage helped to bring the Foster’s ‘No Worries’ message to an estimated 45 million people and promoted a dynamic, ongoing conversation both on- and offline surrounding the ‘No Worries’ ethos and the Foster’s brand. The ‘No Worries’ studies and celebrity giveaways alone gen- erated an estimated advertising value equivalent of £150,000 in press cover- age, and celebrities tweeting about the campaign to more than 100,000 followers.
Lessons
Harnessing social media trends, such as the burgeoning popularity of Twitter (which was hitting its zenith in terms of explosive growth right about the time this campaign launched) can deliver amazing results and can give skilfully crafted and innovative campaigns potentially massive exposure. The interac- tive nature of social media and the unparallelled reach it has can allow your brand to engage with influencers (celebrity tweeters in this case) in the online community, and through them a huge pool of relevant individuals likely to be interested in what your business or website has to offer.
The team at Play identified an opportunity to create something of value to its target market out of the seemingly random tidal wave of user-generated content created every day by users of Twitter. Together it is just noise, but filtered, analysed and presented in a particular way, suddenly it becomes interesting, engaging and fresh. The campaign also managed to bridge the digital/traditional divide, transcending media boundaries by using Twitter and the Ozometer website as a springboard to generate offline media exposure. That exposure in turn drove more people online, which gave the campaign broader reach and generated even more interest.
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Marketers, be wary of promising a campaign will ever go viral. There is nothing more pathetic and job-threatening than the marketer who is so desparate to have a viral hit on their hands they will stoop to extraordinary levels of invest- ment. Instead, learn from this and other case studies such as World Malaria Day. Celebrities will help to ignite a viral campaign but not as much as under- standing the personalities and motivations of your audience – the Nokia N97 campaign is a really good example of this. However, there is something soothing and refreshing about a cool brand and cool beer like Foster’s to help melt a few barriers in the hunt for engagement – and if that benefit is available to you then use it to its fullest extreme.
What’s your ‘No Worries’ score?
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● www.playwithus.co.uk/work/fosters/ozometer/index.html
Links to campaign creative
129 The Ozometer