Using Social Applications In Ad Campaigns

After working in an advertising agency I have realized that the majority of marketing budgets go to advertising, and there is a significant opportunity to enhance it with social tools. But social media marketing typically generates longer-term relationships, which means that it is out of sync with the quick-hit nature of most advertising.

To enhance an ad campaign with social elements, interactive marketers should know their audience’s behavior, commit to the communities for the long term, plan for transitions or community exits, and develop new campaign metrics.

What I really feel is that Social Applications enhance traditional advertising and that is what I am going to talk in the first part of my topic.

Advertising is by far the largest part of marketing budgets, but it’s typically a time-limited spend with a specific objective, like increasing awareness. Social media, by contrast, gets less than 1/4th from the average marketer but builds brand advocates and word of mouth over the long term.


So should you use social applications in ad campaigns? Yes, but it takes skill to adapt this longer-term strategy to the quicker pace of ad creative and placement. Accounting for these differences, you can use social marketing in five different ways to enhance your ad campaigns:

1. Use communities to launch and extend campaigns.

If you’ve already built a community of brand evangelists, use them to help disseminate the message. For instance, when Vodafone recently launched its new Vodafone Zoo Zoo campaign, the company got more than 3 Lakh (0.3 Million) Facebook fans. These Facebook brand evangelists got all the new services ad as tag it “I like this,” leave a comment, or share with a friend.

2. Use campaigns to begin building your long-term channels.

Lenovo, working with the agency OgilvyOne, allocated a portion of its marketing budget for the High Security Laptops to bring its “Face Recognition Feature” campaign to the social media world. Marketers developed programs within MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter to help support people during the product launch. While these programs were created for short-term use, Lenovo continues to use them as long-term platforms to provide product for their followers.

3. Build communities around existing events — or create new ones.

Use social communities to build excitement around events that are relevant to your brand. For example, PepsiCo used major events such as the inauguration of US President Barack Obama and the Super Bowl to support its “Refresh Everything” campaign.

In December 2008, Pepsi created a YouTube channel asking people to submit April 29, 2009 a video message to President Obama, and these videos received more than 200,000 views. Pepsi also created a Facebook application, a Tumblr site, and a mobile site.

Or you can create your own events, as Tata Tea did with "Jaagore" campaign where it asked people to register and become part of the voting community and get more involved in asking people to come out and exercise there voting rights.

4. Enhance display media with social tools.

There are options to make your display mediasocial. PopularMedia’s “Influencer Ads” entice users to get friends to join them in contests or other marketing programs by incorporating the advertising content into the user’s blog, social network, Web site, or email.

Coca-Cola recently used SocialMedia.com’s WOMI product, which features a “social advertising engine” that identifies the influential friends within a social graph to generate positive word of mouth for brands or products. Result: a 33% increase in purchase intent for Coca-Cola’s cherry Coke brand in one week.

Other tools such as Facebook’s engagement ads, Media6Degrees’ behavioral targeting, Spongecell’s social calendar tools, and SocialVibe’s cause-related applications offer marketers ways to enhance their paid media campaigns.


5. Integrate your brand in external communities.

MySpace is beginning to integrate branded content into its social ecosystem. Sunkist, for example, is the exclusive sponsor of “The List” on MySpace, which is a music franchise that highlights new or popular music and hosts concerts in four different geographies. Sunkist has an online presence within this online community and sponsors exclusive content for the events. While similar to traditional sponsorships, these types of programs allow brands to integrate original content into the social world.